Creative Books That Foster Inspiring Ideas Among College Students

New book presents information on how to bring the arts to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields as per a study at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), to be published in a forthcoming book, Writing STEAM: Composition, STEM, and a New Humanities. The book chapter outlines a creative exercise that used picture books to help first-year college students explore their ideas, beliefs, and humanistic impulses regarding their future majors.

“We present a meaningful and replicable case study in which college students at a technical institution explored their chosen area of study by creating a children’s picture book. By pairing this exercise of artistic expression and storytelling with first-year writing lessons like audience awareness, diction, and information organization, this assignment fused students’ interest in STEM with lessons in communication needed to be effective in those fields,” says Rebekah Fitzsimmons, assistant teaching professor of professional communication at CMU’s Heinz College, who co-authored the chapter.

The book examines how writing instruction, scholarship, and program administration can bring STEM and the humanities together in creative and beneficial ways.

This exercise thereby allows the students to examine how representation in children’s books, combined with social class, race, and access, can limit society’s vision of who can succeed in STEM fields.

“In developing an artistic pathway for students to explore their budding areas of expertise while sharing their joy and passion for their work with others, this picture book project melds the elements of STEAM into a useful, rigorous, and fun project for first-year writing courses with benefits to the students and the community that last far beyond the college classroom,” says Tamara Pearson, then associate director of school and community engagement at the Center for Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing at Georgia Tech, who co-authored the chapter and organized the readings to young students.

Source-Medindia