Abstract:

STEAM education combines Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics to create holistic and meaningful learning experiences that prepare learners for an interconnected and rapidly evolving world. In STEAM education classrooms, learning is typically organised around interdisciplinary, project-based experiences that connect scientific and technological understanding with artistic and creative expression. Despite its growing pedagogical appeal, the implementation of STEAM education presents significant challenges at the classroom level, particularly concerning educators’ roles, competences, and professional readiness. Many educators still perceive STEAM education as a sequence of isolated activities rather than as a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to learning. Moorever, they find it hard to allocate time for collaborative planning, access suitable resources, and obtain sufficient institutional support, while the lack of expertise, limited teaching experience in interdisciplinary settings, insufficient training, and inadequate preparation time further hinder effective implementation.

Numerous studies emphasize that the effective application of STEAM education will greatly benefit from the ability of educators to collaborate in the design and teaching practices. Educators need structured opportunities to collaborate and practice integrating science, mathematics, and other domains in meaningful ways. In this paper, we present empirical evidence that we have gathered from several desk and field studies that we have conducted since 2020 that support this. Our studies show that educators consider very important the preparation of STEAM educational activities and content in collaboration with educators from other disciplines; STEAM education projects or activities should be designed and implemented by teams of educators. That is why communication and collaboration skills are considered as significant. This includes collaboration among educators coming from different disciplines or schools, but also collaboration with industry, cultural institutions, and communities. Participation in communities of practice (CoPs) has been identified as a vital need for STEAM educators to enhance professional growth and instructional innovation. Moreover, new roles, such as STEAM lab expert or STEAM educator’s assistant must be introduced, to achieve efficient realization of STEAM education in the classroom.

Based on the above findings, we included "Educator as community member" as one of the five roles of a STEAM educator in "STEAMComp Edu: the STEAM educators’ competence framework" that we designed. To efficiently act this role, educators must engage in STE(A)M communities of educators and in institutional communities for STEAM education, as well as participate in research and business communities for STEAM education. This framework has been validated by a large number of educators in the context of several European-funded projects, such as STEAMonEdu and Spice, and has served as the basis for creating MOOCs and blended courses, establishing online communities of educators, and proposing new occupational profiles for educators and necessary personnel to collaboratively deliver STEAM education in the classroom.

Keywords:

STEAM education, collaboration, research, competence framework.