Editorial: STEAM Education in the Asia Pacific Region

Abstract

The integration of the arts into the teaching of STEM subjects (STEAM) is an innovative approach to teaching science that has been tried out or adopted in several countries in and outside the Asia-Pacific region. The term ‘arts’ covers a broad area including visual arts (drawing, photography etc.), the humanities (history and literature) and any socio-cultural practice or product (e.g., media facade, traditional house architecture, musical instruments, etc.). There have been many publications on STEAM education in Korean journals in Korea, where STEAM has been implemented in the national curriculum since 2012. However, there have been few publications in English on Korean efforts at implementing STEAM and Korean research on STEAM. Publications in English disseminate information and research results about STEAM in Korea to a wider international audience. In addition, while there have been few reports on STEAM from other countries in the Asia-Pacific region, this does not mean that STEAM is unknown or has not been attempted in those countries. Using the Visualization of Similarities (VOS) program (Van Eck & Waltman, 2010) and the key words ‘STEAM education’ to analyze 470 papers published in SCOPUS yielded the results shown in Figure 1. From the results we can see that there has been work on STEAM in five Asia-Pacific countries: China, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines and Thailand. It is possible that interest in and research on STEAM in Asia-Pacific countries has been under-represented in SCOPUS and other English language science education journals because of the challenges of writing papers for