Despite the aims of STEAM education to promote flexibility of thinking and
creativity, the current STEAM programs heavily rely upon prescriptive curriculum
and problem-solving education. This study examined the advantages and feasilbility
of art-based STEAM education programs that introduce deductive inquiries and
emergent learning objectives from the complex setting of STEAM education
program employing the design study as a research method. The study designed,
practiced and investigated art lessons, as a part of the art-based STEAM program
for the summer art camp for 6th graders held in a university in Seoul in both
2013 and 2014. In recent years, many art educators has paid attention to the
thinking skills and attitudes that the contemporary artists employ when they
develop and make their artwork. The art-based STEAM programs studied in this
research introduced affective and conative objectives induced from the thinking
skills and attitudes that the contemporary artists utilize for their artwork. These
objectives include observing(as a sensitiveness to the meaning of the banal),
connecting, imagining, exploring, extending, expressing, planning, representing, and
developing basic skills and attitudes toward art. The study found that the uses and
the meanings of art in the STEAM programs can be greater than those in the
existing studies of art-based STEAM programs particularly when the STEAM
programs shed light on the aspects of learning of affective and conative objectives.
Also this study suggests that the art-based STEAM education programs centering
on fostering and assessing those objectives should be flexible enough to include
emergent learning concepts and instructional strategies to respond to the changing
context of learning and instruction.