Quigley, C. F., & Herro, D. (2019). An educator´s guide to STEAM. Engaging students using real-world problems. New York: Teachers College Press. 153 pp.

Abstract

I can clearly recall the day I really learned about the concept of the circle. This shape, which is apparently easy to draw, by hand or with a compass if you want greater accuracy, has much deeper implications if we pay it the attention it deserves and attempt to understand it to its full extent. One day, when I was a child, the art teacher was off ill and another teacher who was covering for him took a piece of chalk tied to a length of string and made us see clearly the full meaning of the circle. That teacher did not teach us to draw circles — we had already known how to do that for some time. Instead, he helped us touch the circle with our own hands, manipulate it, transfer it, look at it from different perspectives. The circle stopped being a simple drawing on the board or on paper and became a relevant concept, not just for art as a subject, but also for mathematics, as it gave meaning to the formulas we were studying and associated concepts like radius, diameter, and perimeter, for biology as we came to understand why many organisms are round, for physics in relation to the distribution of forces, and for aesthetics in relation to the perfection inherent to drawing itself. This simple transdisciplinary experience changed our perception of the circle and also of other content. It helped us understand that what different teachers talked about was not just relevant to their subjects, but could actually help us to better understand what we were studying in other apparently different subjects. Our perception of reality changed, becoming less narrow and clumsy and more interconnected and complete. That lesson made us a bit more intellectually mature.