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NAIS Pudong, MIT work with eye on future
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STEAM is a hot topic in education today. Increasingly, efforts are made into developing programs that aim to integrate the individual content areas into a unified curriculum that offers greater connection to the real world and provides authentic opportunities for learning and solving problems.
To promote the culture of STEAM, Nord Anglia International School, Pudong (a member of the Nord Anglia Education family) collaborates with Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT is the world’s leading university in technology and innovation, repeatedly ranked as the world’s No. 1 university, according to the QS World University Rankings. NAIS recognizes the need for integrated skills and knowledge that have traditionally been taught separately to meet the demands of our rapidly changing technology, and consequently employment opportunities. Job creation has changed significantly in the past 10 years with the introduction of automation and development of artificial intelligence in manufacturing and service industries.
Self-driving cars, for example, are not science-fiction anymore and will be seen on our roads in the future. Many traditional educational settings don’t seem to address the fact that we are teaching the young generation for jobs that may not exist by the time they become graduates.
STEAM education addresses this issue by bringing together the subjects and looking how to solve problems through the lens of multiple disciplines. At NAIS Pudong, we promote opportunities for students to combine the theoretical skills they have learned in different subjects to innovate, design and engineer products that could solve some of the world’s problems. Some examples of students’ projects include a solar-powered mobile charging station that will be stationed in the school park and a coded multi-functional display with a live feed of air quality index along with weather features. These projects promote a much deeper conceptual understanding through problem solving.
However, we must be mindful of the deliverable curriculum requirements that we have and this sets a limitation in terms of the time that can be devoted to the STEAM approach. Another limitation is that not all teachers are comfortable in adjusting their long-established teaching style although some schools are investing in staff training to address this issue. At NAIS Pudong, we were lucky enough to have some teachers attend a professional development workshop at MIT during the summer.
The dean of Admissions for MIT commented how students who get involved in actively making products or attempting to address some of the real-life challenges the Earth and humanity are facing, stand a better chance of getting into the world’s leading universities compared to students who have the same academic profile without having had opportunities in STEM. Hence, many schools are promoting the philosophy of “creating or making” through extra-curricular activities and some collapsed timetables to strike a balance between regular curricula and project-based learning.
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