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Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief (2020)

Chapter: Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief

Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
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Proceedings of a Workshop


March 2020

IN BRIEF

Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education
Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief

“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual toward freedom.”

- Albert Einstein

In its 2018 report The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree, a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine pointed to an emerging body of evidence suggesting that integration of the arts, humanities, and STEMM fields—science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine—is associated with positive learning outcomes that may help students enter the workforce, live enriched lives, and become active and informed members of a modern democracy. As the Committee on the Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education wrote in its report, “The available evidence is sufficient to urge support for courses and programs that integrate the arts and humanities with STEMM in higher education.”

On April 12, 2019, the National Academies held a national convening in Washington, DC, to review, extend, and disseminate the committee’s findings. “The report was just the first phase of our work,” said Ashley Bear, the study director for the committee. “The second phase of our work is focused on outreach, implementation, and understanding how we can overcome the many barriers that exist in higher education and interfere with our ability to adopt more innovative models.” At the convening, which was part of a series of events held across the United States, committee members, students, faculty members, and others discussed the future of higher education, the benefits of integration, and examples of integration that have proven to have positive effects. In addition, the convening featured dramatic readings that illustrated some of the issues involved with integrating the arts, humanities, and STEMM fields.

RECALIBRATING HIGHER EDUCATION

In his opening remarks, David Skorton, chair of the committee that produced the Branches from the Same Tree report, and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, said that the difficult issues facing society today will not be solved by science and technology alone. The humanities and arts, beyond their inherent value and beauty, will help solve the great problems facing humanity. The arts and humanities can help us explore what it means to be fully human, which is “something you don't learn in an anatomy class,”said Skorton.

Skorton cited many examples of ways in which different fields of learning have supported and inspired each other. Albert Einstein was a devoted musician who often played his violin while working on a theory. During the Italian Renaissance, the Medici family bankrolled sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, and architects, and the creativity that flowed from that period still reverberates today. At the same time that Leonardo da Vinci was painting the Mona Lisa he was finishing the Codex on the Flight of Birds, which connected his observations of birds to the mechanics of flight to the potential of engineered human flight. The French post impressionist Georges Seurat


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Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
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studied color theory, perception, and psychology, which he combined to create an immediately identifiable artistic style. The current director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Fabiola Gianotti, is as an accomplished pianist who has said, “too often people consider science and the arts completely decoupled, compartmentalized. To me they are not different things. They are both the highest expressions of creativity, of curiosity, of the ingenuity of humanity.”

Skorton observed that Branches of the Same Tree outlined three goals for higher education to meet the needs of students and society:

• Improve capacity building for 21st-century workers and citizens.

• Draw on the untapped potential for innovation and collaboration within and beyond the university.

• Cultivate more robust cultural and ethical commitments to empathy, inclusion, and respect for the rich diversity of human identity and experience.

Skorton cited several examples of integration of the arts, humanities, and STEMM fields to achieve these goals. Every undergraduate at Worcester Polytechnic Institute completes a humanities and art project. Additionally, first year students can sign up for a “Great Problems Seminar” that tackles a wide range of global sociotechnical changes. Professors at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Syracuse University have taught neurobiology by having their students write haiku, which has helped them retain and explain the deeper meaning of abstruse concepts. Youngstown State University brings together faculty and students from STEMM fields and the arts to collaborate on innovative projects, such as a retro cell phone prototype designed by students in mechanical engineering and sculpture.

Skorton emphasized the third goal cited in the report: making the learning environment in higher education more engaging to everyone, including women and minorities. At one of the first programs to integrate the arts, humanities, and STEMM fields, underrepresented students at the Texas A&M College of Engineering had higher retention rates than similar students in the traditional A&M curriculum. When the computer science department of Union College in New York integrated real world issues and wove humanistic themes, such as games and creativity into its introductory level curriculum, it saw an increase in the number of women enrolled.

The committee's report makes a compelling case that higher education needs to be recalibrated, Skorton said. Given rapid changes in the economy, technology, and education, it makes sense to place a renewed emphasis on a more integrated liberal arts education instead of disciplinary specialization. Integrating the arts and humanities with STEMM disciplines will help create a new generation of people equal to the tasks of our age, he concluded.

FACULTY MEMBERS’ PERSPECTIVES

In the first panel discussion, four speakers described their experiences with integration of the arts, humanities, and STEMM fields in the context of their careers, and the effects of integration on students.

As a boy growing up in India, Paul Shrivastava took the traditional route of studying mechanical engineering as an undergraduate, but he found himself dissatisfied with the narrowness of his education. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, he taught and conducted research at New York University, Bucknell University, and Concordia University in Montreal. While all three institutions provided him with the challenges and rewards of a life in academia, he wanted to be a more “holistic thinker, feeler, and actor.” As executive director of the Future Earth global research platform, he helped foster “transdisciplinary science that begins with problems of the real world.” This platform has contributed to the work of such organizations as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United Nations. Since 2017, he has been chief sustainability officer of Pennsylvania State University and director of the Sustainability Institute and professor of management at Penn State's Smeal College of Business. During his time at Penn State, Shrivastava enacted amandate of incorporating sustainability across the curriculum, research, student life, community engagement, and operation of physical facilities. “I love this job,” he said. “After 40 years, I feel like I've arrived where I wanted to start my journey.”

Shannon Jackson, associate vice chancellor for the Arts + Design and the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said that she was always acting in or directing a performance during high school, college, and graduate school, even as she was progressing as a scholar. This cross-disciplinary engagement has taken two major forms over the course of her career. As a graduate student at Northwestern University, she became fascinated by Jane Addams’ Hull House as an example of how the arts can foster social change. Since then, she has been working on issues associated with how artists and designers engage with such issues as immigration, fair housing, city policy, food insecurity, and climate. “The histori-

Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
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cal lens that Hull House gave me informs how I think about the contemporary landscape, where we see an incredible network of international artists who are committed to social change and to thinking about how one uses the visual, sonic, embodied, architectural, spatial, and linguistic discursive media of the arts to catalyze social change.” She also has worked on issues at the intersection of arts and technology, including “the reciprocal relationship between artistic form and technological development—both how new technologies change the medium of the arts, change the delivery system of the arts, and also how the arts galvanize innovation in new technology, sometimes anticipating developments in technology before they occur.”

Thomas Ewing, professor of history and associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, began thinking more deeply about interdisciplinary teaching and research when he was the principal investigator for a “Digging into Data” Challenge Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which forced him to think not only about the data, sources, and evidence he used in his scholarship but also about the arguments, interpretive skills, and methods that he was using both in his research and teaching. At about the same time, he became associate dean for research at Virginia Tech and found himself looking for opportunities to bring faculty and students together across a range of fields—the arts, English, religion, science, medicine, computer science, and so on. Finally, Virginia Tech was rethinking its general education requirements and moving in the direction of integration rather than disconnected courses. “That created an opportunity for me, in terms of my teaching, to start to think about data from a humanities perspective and . . . to teach students who are in computer science or in math or statistics or other fields about the value of a humanities perspective.”

After graduating from college, Bonnie Dill worked in the war on poverty while debating whether to approach social change from an individual level or an institutional level. Opting for the former, she went to graduate school in human relations and became a counselor in New York City. She then earned a Ph.D. in sociology and began to work at the intersection of race and gender, helping to build the foundation for what is today known as intersectionality. Coming to the University of Maryland, she joined the women's studies department, “where we had lots of conversations about what it meant to be an interdisciplinary program.” As she and her colleagues developed Ph.D. programs that trained scholars to do interdisciplinary work, they also had to help their graduates figure out how to apply knowledge in many different fields. “As a social scientist, I was always very humanistic in my approaches and in the work that I did,” she said, an approach she has continued as dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland. “How do you . . . raise the level of understanding of what is done in the arts and humanities and then think about how that contributes to the broader research mission at an institution?”

During the discussion portion of the session, Jackson observed that integration is not one thing. Combining the performing arts with sculpture is different than combining the performing arts with history. “Integration takes many forms,” she said. “I find that to be a challenge in integrating our fields.” She also mentioned a creative pedagogy grant at her institution, which is relatively small—up to $5,000—but which allows faculty members to integrate some kind of creative project into their classes. The grants allow people in all fields to challenge themselves in a low risk way to create new kinds of learning structures.

Shrivastava added that academics have fragmented conversations in higher education into more than 8,000 different disciplines in the United States alone and more than 15,000 in the world, since scholarly disciplines are defined differently around the world. He suggested not trying to integrate across 8,000 disciplines, which is impossible, but to look at problems on the ground. “What is it that needs to be solved? [Then] bring in the relevant conversations in resolving those issues. That's what transdisciplinary science tends to do.”

Shrivastava also noted that creativity is a cognitive skill that can be taught in a classroom or in theaters and arts courses. But empathy is an emotional skill that is more difficult to bring into the classroom, at least into lecturing and traditional educational practices. Penn State has developed a different kind of classroom, which it calls a living laboratory, to take an idea from the real world, unusually from a local community, as a setting for research and teaching. Empathy can be brought into such an endeavor because “you're actually talking to people of different colors and creeds and economic levels to understand the problem, and you don't have to separately teach empathy. In order to be successful in a living lab, you have to empathize with the stakeholders that are brought into engagement.”

In response to a question about educating teachers at the elementary and secondary levels to be interdisciplinary in their teaching, Ewing noted that Virginia Tech’s School of Education is very aware of the issue. Once teachers begin their professions, they tend to get tracked into certain subjects, but many teachers are very interested in working across disciplines, which encourages teamwork and collaboration. “The more that universities are aware of what's possible in schools, and then re integrate that back into their pre service training, there is space for exactly this kind of integration of science, technology, and mathematics with the humanities and the arts.” However, this also requires awareness of the constraints within schools, such as the implications of high stakes testing. “I don't want to be overly idealistic about it, but I do think there is a space there.”

Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
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Dill pointed toward a body of literature revealing that empathy develops as people read literature. The arts often center on not just intellectual intelligence but emotional intelligence, she said. “Those are reasons why the arts and humanities need to be integrated into STEMM, because those things are inherent in what we do.” Jackson mentioned that putting students and faculty in creative exchanges provides a context for cultivating compassion and empathy. “One of the phrases that I love in the report,” she said, “is ‘tolerance for ambiguity.’ Preparing people for a job that cannot be fully anticipated requires a tolerance for ambiguity.”

Jackson mentioned several “low-to-the-ground, win-win” efforts that have enhanced access at the University of California, Berkeley, where a third of undergraduates are on Pell grants and a quarter of undergraduates are the first in their families to go to college. One is having undergraduates of all majors work in regional communities and schools. “There's only so much that service learning models can do to combat major systemic inequity,” she said, but undergraduates “want to give back, and schools that need more boots on the ground can create great regional partnerships that are long term and sustained.” Dill emphasized the importance of teacher education in higher education. Schools of education are connected to every county in their states, she said, and “if we could think about how we might apply these kinds of issues to teacher education, it might be a starting point.”

STUDENTS’ PERSPECTIVES

In the second panel of the convening, three students described the importance of integration in their education and the effect it has had on their lives.

Camellia Pastore, a freshman majoring in computer science at Virginia Tech, said that she was devoted to the humanities in high school. “I did not want to do anything related to engineering.” But then she took a computer science class and realized the extent to which computer science is connected to the rest of the world. Referring to computer languages as “coding languages” is an apt metaphor she said, because “when you learn to speak a new language, you can communicate with more people, but when you learn a coding language you can communicate with technology, and technology is now becoming a part of everything.”

Pastore said that she has had both satisfactory and unsatisfactory experiences with integration in high school and college. Virginia Tech has a core curriculum known as Pathways in which undergraduates are required to take courses in various fields to gain a breadth of experience. However, many students are able to place out of those classes because they are entering college either from a community college or from a high school that offers dual enrollment classes. Pastore said that if she was not minoring in a humanities subject, she could take only two classes outside the STEMM curriculum for her entire four years at Virginia Tech. Furthermore, many students do not take the core curriculum classes seriously, she said. In an arts class she took, students “looked at paintings or listened to jazz and got graded on explaining how it made you feel. It was tons of fun for me. I thought it was a wonderful break from going to math all day. But most people skipped it, because you don't really have to be there, and that defeats the purpose.”

She recommended the development of interdisciplinary classes “because that is where all our fields are headed anyway.” In a computer science class, for example, students could create apps for a health club, for the entertainment industry, or for a political campaign. “You have to understand the field that you're trying to make a product for.” Similarly, if liberal arts students learned more about the science and technology they will be using in their jobs, they would be better prepared for the workplace. When a friend asked her whether she knew how to code in Python, she responded, “everyone needs to know this, because it’s everywhere now.”

Pastore has also served as a volunteer computer science teacher to K-12 students. “I was amazed at how, by the time kids hit middle school, they already have a very clear idea of what an engineer looks like, what a computer scientist looks like, and looks like me; often times the person they envision as the prototypical computer scientist and engineer is a white man.” Colleges have an opportunity to work with diverse groups of students both before and during college to give them the interdisciplinary education they will need, she said. “A lot of different types of people go through universities, and we want everyone to come out much better than when they began.”

Rediet Woldeselassie, a graduate student of health informatics and data analytics in the College of Health and Human Services at George Mason University, learned about the value of understanding people's personalities while serving for ten years in the Marines. Because of that experience, he studied psychology for two years before completing his undergraduate studies in health administration with a focus on management. As part of the curriculum, he took two classes in computer science, and, like Pastore, was fascinated by the subject. “This is a whole different language,” he realized. “I'm bilingual as well, and originally from Ethiopia, so this is a third language that I can possibly learn,” and he decided to pursue a more technical degree in graduate school. Still, he retained his interest in psychology. STEMM subjects and non-STEMM subjects “complement each other,” he said, “because the base of it all is us,

Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
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people as a whole, our thought processes, our mindsets, our biases, our ways of thinking.”

Woldeselassie pointed out that not only is he from an immigrant family but he is the first person in his family to complete an undergraduate degree, much less a graduate degree. That can create difficulties for students who are from families who see STEMM degrees as pathways to success, he said. His own family members asked him why he was studying psychology and what he planned to do with that education. “But there is something that comes with the knowledge that you gain from studying something in the humanities,” he said. “Studying psychology helped me develop as a person; it helped me expand my horizon and focus on what I wanted to study.” Even as he works with electronic health records he reminds himself that there are people behind the data, which helps him bridge the gap between the two disciplines.

Each student is different and is under a unique set of pressures, Woldeselassie observed. Similarly, intelligence and creativity come in many different forms, “so it's important for us to approach each person with a level of empathy and allow them to be expressive.” Many underrepresented students do not complete college after they start, which requires that they know more about the opportunities that are available to them. “You don’t have to carry the opportunity all by yourself,” he advised. “People are willing to help you.” Students need to be patient with themselves, he said, and they need to be courageous. “Part of that courage comes from understanding yourself, which goes back to studying humanities and not just technology. It all connects. It's a big cycle.”

Leigh Carroll, a labor organizer with a health care union, said that her educational path has always been very interdisciplinary. She studied neuroscience as an undergraduate while also taking piano lessons. She joined the Peace Corps, where she taught high school science in Tanzania. She went to graduate school “because that's what we do when we don't know what we're going to do,” where she discovered urban planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “What I really appreciated about that field was that it studies how to make a place better from so many different angles.” Over the course of her graduate program, she worked on subjects as varied as economics, history, and the ways in which oppression can be designed into built environments.

As a labor union organizer, she works with home health care workers who perform one-on-one care in homes. “They do tremendously hard work, physical work, emotional work, mental work, but they're tremendously underpaid. The average wage in Pennsylvania is $10.50 an hour, and none of them has health care benefits, even though I think they're the backbone of our health care system.” Her job also requires interdisciplinarity, she said. For example, she discussed the issues involved with creating a care-based economy and society. A greater appreciation of the humanities could facilitate the redirection of resources from activities that involve violence, such as fighting wars, to taking care of people, she said. She also pointed out that about one-third of Americans live below or close to the poverty line, and these individuals need access to education and to the organizations that make decisions affecting their lives, access that is often taken for granted by more affluent Americans.

Asked during the discussion session about how they have been influenced by older people, who may be better able to integrate their experiences than other mentors, Pastore recalled her experience with one of her grandmothers who lived with her family for many years and now is in a nursing home near the family’s house. Growing up with her grandmother has influenced her understanding both of people and of systems, she said. Watching and dealing with the medical system has affected her own life in ways that she “never would have expected.” Carroll related the question to the church she attends in Pittsburgh. “How we actively love other people in the world is key to interdisciplinary education,” she said. In graduate school she read books by people who were undergoing societal and spiritual struggles, and she is now able to relate those struggles to the people she knows in her church, including “the elderly women and men in my church who impart wisdom all of the time into my life.” Woldeselassie added that he used to volunteer at a retirement home, which was an eye opening experience for him because there “a richness that comes with this interaction, and it inspires you to look at things in a different way that you never thought of before.”

When asked about the experiences in their childhood that contributed to their empathy and creativity, Woldeselassie said that he learned much of the social skills that he has applied in his education during his time in the Marines. Carroll gave credit to some of her high school friends, such as a best friend who spent “more time writing hip hop verses than he did in the classroom.” Pastore agreed that people often learn about empathy outside the classroom. She said that she grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was present for the 2017 rallies involving white supremacists. “Everyone knows about the tragedy that went down, but what people don't see is what happens after that, watching a community try to recover.” The event forced the community to deal with not only the problems that outsiders brought to the town but with problems in the town itself. Living through that “has been something that’s really impacted the way I think about the world.”

Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
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BREAKOUT SESSIONS

In the afternoon, participants at the convening divided into four breakout groups to discuss in greater depth examples of integration and the opportunities and challenges associated with integration. In the session entitled “Teaching Tomorrow Today: Humanities, Arts, and STEMM in Conversation,” participants discussed how to integrate the humanities and arts into other fields of study with integrity, so that disciplines are not treated instrumentally or as service courses for other bodies of study. For example, the group heard about a program at Furman University that involves “ethical interdisciplinarity,” in which students experience an interactive collaboration among disciplines with mutual respect for the methodologies and ways of knowing characteristic of each discipline. As one breakout participant said, the task of integration is a systems problem in which the disciplines need to be treated as peers in solving the compelling challenges of the 21st century.

In the breakout session entitled “Toward Healthy Communities: NEA Arts Research Labs and Arts in Health Intersections,” participants focused on efforts to promote integration in medical education, public health, and clinical practice. Such efforts have become increasingly widespread in recent years as the benefits of integration in medical education have become apparent. As one example, they heard about a program called Creating Healthy Communities: Arts + Public Health in America, which is being led by the University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine in partnership with ArtPlace America. The program has been developing a framework that synthesizes theory, evidence, and best practice models to provide arts and public health practitioners with the resources needed to develop effective interdisciplinary partnerships, implement evidence-based practices, and reliably measure outcomes.

During the breakout session entitled “Examples of Integrative Courses,” participants heard about examples of integrative courses that can serve as models for such efforts elsewhere. At Drexel University, students are collaborating to build robots that play musical instruments, with performances and outreach to K-12 students as integral parts of the program. At the University of Texas, students are integrating music even more broadly with STEMM fields, resulting in a variety of innovative projects that assessments have shown to produce positive changes in student attitudes about the benefits of integration. At the University of Wyoming, students can take a course called “Art in the Environment,” which enables students to use resources from throughout the campus to represent environmental concepts through artistic media. At Howard University, students have formed teams to participate in the DC Public Health Case Challenge, which promotes interdisciplinary, problem-based learning around public health issues that face the Washington, DC, community. All these programs and many others offerlessons in how to build and sustain integrative programs that could be much more widely applied, the speakers and other participants observed.

In the session entitled “Assessments: What’s Working and What’s Not?” participants discussed how to assess the impact of integrative courses, programs, and experiences on student learning. This requires assessing not only what students have learned but the ways in which integrative activities affect learning, which involves such issues as the quality of the pedagogies students encounter in integrative programs, the extent to which programs are implemented consistently across sections, the nature of students’ interactions with peers, and the assumptions and knowledge that students bring to a program. Articulating the goals of a learning experience is the first step in assessment, participants at the session pointed out, which can be particularly complex with interdisciplinary activities that draw on different terminology and perspectives. Furthermore, goals may evolve as more evidence is gathered and evaluated about the nature and impact of interdisciplinary activities. Also, connecting the features of an educational intervention to particular outcomes can be difficult. For example, does integration or a faculty member’s enthusiasm for integration lead to a particular impact? Such observations suggest that gathering multiple forms of evidence over time will be necessary, participants said. They also emphasize that assessment does not need to be perfect from the start. Simpler assessments such as gathering faculty and student feedback about goals, outcomes, and key processes can lead to more sophisticated assessments over time.

SUCCESSFULLY INTEGRATING THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION

In the final session of the convening, four representatives of institutions that are part of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities identified commonalities in the integrative programs described by previous speakers. Guna Nadarajan, dean of the Penny W. Stamps School of Arts & Design at the University of Michigan, emphasized the role of real-world problems as a way of transcending disciplinary silos. He also noted that many integrative programs have been established as separate centers instead of being parts of individual departments or colleges.

Aileen Huang-Saad, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, entrepreneurship, and engineering education at the University of Michigan, pointed to the importance of support from an institution’s leadership. The consen-

Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
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sus report mentions that one of the many barriers to an integrative curriculum is institutional support. At Michigan, the president of the university was very supportive of the Center for Entrepreneurship in the College of Engineering, which has grown to involve more than 4,000 students each year who participate in entrepreneurship programs. “That gave people on the ground the opportunity and the bandwidth to be able to move forward.” In addition, students supported the program by enrolling in it, producing alignment for the program from the top down. At the Center for Entrepreneurship, students have many opportunities to learn from a wide array of faculty. Although this curriculum may not explicitly include the arts and humanities, it does encourage diverse learning experiences that prepare students to “. . . identify and act on opportunities to solve problems in any organization, or entrepreneurial endeavor.”1 This skill-set arguably better prepares students to adapt to and meet the needs of the ever-changing demands of the labor force by creating a curriculum that draws on the knowledge base of many different disciplines.

Jill Sonke, director of the Center for the Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida, identified risk taking and comfort with failure as common elements of successful programs. For example, her university is implementing a new undergraduate core curriculum called UF Quest that challenges students to grapple with intellectual and social programs that extend beyond the classroom and any one discipline. “An entire curriculum revision is a huge undertaking,” she said. “We’re in an environment where that risk is seen as worth taking because of what it’s bringing to students.”

Finally, Nicholas Allen, director of the Willson Center for Humanities and Art at the University of Georgia, described the social foundations of interdisciplinary activities. “You need a kind of sociability,” he said. “I went to lunch for the first two years with a different person nearly every day.” Social interactions enable people to learn each other’s languages and see from other perspectives. “We can share stories, and we can learn from that.”

At the end of the convening, Tom Rudin, director of the Board on Higher Education at the National Academies, thanked the attendees and gave them an assignment. The Branches from the Same Tree report will fall short, he said, “if all of you don’t carry it forward and bring it back to your campuses, your governors, your state legislators, your members of Congress, and others to mobilize action.”

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1See https://cfe.umich.edu/about/mission/.

Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
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DISCLAIMER: The Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief was prepared by Steve Olson as a factual proceedings of what occurred at the meeting. The statements made are those of the author or individual meeting participants and do not necessarily represent the views of all meeting participants, the planning committee, or the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

REVIEWERS: To ensure that it meets institutional standards for quality and objectivity, this Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief was reviewed by Charles Blaich, Wabash College; Paul Shrivastava, Pennsylvania State University; and Mary Beth Leigh, University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Marilyn Baker, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, served as the review coordinator.

SPONSORS: This workshop was supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation.

For additional information, visit http://www.nas.edu/pga.

Suggested citation: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop-in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25675.

Policy and Global Affairs

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Copyright 2020 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
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Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
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Page 2
Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
×
Page 3
Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
×
Page 4
Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
×
Page 5
Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
×
Page 6
Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
×
Page 7
Suggested Citation:"Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop - in Brief." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25675.
×
Page 8
Branches from the Same Tree: A National Convening on the Integration of the Arts, Humanities, and STEMM in Higher Education: Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief Get This Book
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In its 2018 report The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree, a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine pointed to an emerging body of evidence suggesting that integration of the arts, humanities, and STEMM fields - science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine - is associated with positive learning outcomes that may help students enter the workforce, live enriched lives, and become active and informed members of a modern democracy. On April 12, 2019, the National Academies held a national convening in Washington, DC, to review, extend, and disseminate the committee's findings. At the convening, which was part of a series of events held across the United States, committee members, students, faculty members, and others discussed the future of higher education, the benefits of integration, and examples of integration that have proven to have positive effects. In addition, the convening featured dramatic readings that illustrated some of the issues involved with integrating the arts, humanities, and STEMM fields. This publication highlights the presentations of the event.

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