A Review of ACD-STEMM Integration: Part 1: A Taxonomy of Integrated Bridges

This is Part 1 of a three-part analysis of studies concerning useful ways in which visual, plastic, musical and performing arts; crafts; and design (referred to for simplicity as arts-crafts-design, or ACD) may be used to improve learning of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM) and increase professional success in these subjects. We address the following questions: (1) What are the ways in which ACD and STEMM can interact fruitfully? (2) Which of these ways of interacting have been explored using well-devised studies and what do those studies tell us about efficacy? (3) Where are the gaps (and therefore the opportunities) that can readily be addressed by new studies? and (4) What kinds of methods can be used to generate reliable data about effective ACD-STEMM integration?

Part 1 summarizes studies demonstrating that ACD are valuable to STEMM professionals, providing a taxonomy of eight connecting "bridges" that STEMM professionals say they employ to connect arts and science into "integrated networks of enterprise." We demonstrate that STEMM professionals utilizing these bridges are significantly more likely to achieve success than those who do not. These findings make the issue of near and far transfer between ACD and STEMM disciplines irrelevant: The question of far transfer reduces to whether specific links between the two can be found that create direct "near-transfer bridges" between "far-apart" subjects.

To elaborate, we review studies that demonstrate a strong correlation between success in STEMM careers and serious, persistent avocational participation in ACD over a lifetime. These studies range from personal accounts of how ACD skills, knowledge, materials, techniques and inventions have inspired STEMM work to large-scale statistical studies in which scientists, engineers and mathematicians correlate ACD activities with various measures of STEMM success, such as winning a Nobel prize, becoming a member of a National Academy, filing patents or starting new companies.

Correlations are not, of course, causation. What one would like to see are interventions demonstrating not only that ACD can improve STEMM learning and performance but also how they can do so. The second and third parts of this extended abstract provide such evidence. Here we provide a necessary framework for analyzing interventional studies by examining the kinds of connections one might reasonably expect to find between ACD and STEMM. Such a framework, generated from anecdotal and correlational studies described above, utilizes connections between ACD and STEMM that STEMM practitioners themselves believe to be functional.

The ACD-STEMM framework we propose consists of eight types of connections or "bridges":

Bridge 1. Transdisciplinary tools for thinking. In Sparks of Genius (1999), Root-Bernstein and Root-Bernstein previously investigated creative practice among hundreds of individuals drawn from ACD, STEMM, humanities and literary professions to derive a set of cognitive skills of universal utility. These "thinking tools"—observing, imaging, abstracting, pattern recognition, pattern-forming, analogizing, modeling, dimensional thinking, empathizing or play-acting, kinesthetic or body thinking, playing, transforming and synthesizing—form process connections across disciplines.

Bridge 2. ACD implements, methods and materials. Bridge 2 focuses on physical implements, methods of using them and materials to which they are applied as useful connectors between ACD and STEMM practices.

Bridge 3. ACD-generated phenomena. Sometimes artists, working as artists, discover or invent new phenomena that STEMM professionals have never encountered before, which then become the focus of STEMM research.

Bridge 4. ACD principles and structures. Artists sometimes discover new principles governing natural phenomena or invent new kinds of structures that have STEMM applications.

Bridge 5. Experience with the creative process. ACD and STEMM professionals often assert that the creative process of defining new challenges, developing relevant skills, exploring and testing possibilities, and conveying the results to a public audience is universal across disciplines. Process skills learned in ACD transfer to STEMM.

Bridge 6. Transdisciplinary aesthetic principles. STEMM professionals often identify aesthetics as a motivation for their work and as valid criteria for the development and analysis of STEMM research and results. By aesthetics, they mean the same thing ACD professionals mean: a synthetic melding of sense and sensibility, of technique and...