The Importance of Humanities in a STEAM-Powered School

DON REESE, HUMANITIES CO-CHAIR

I step into the usually dark, often cold morning, bending awkwardly to keep the strap of my bag on my shoulder all the way out to the car, where I fit each beverage into its cup holder, pull up Waze on my phone, and turn on a podcast.

Then, I head off to merge onto one of the busiest freeways in America to commute from Providence to Brimmer. This sometimes means being “stuck in traffic” for hours.

Recently, though, I have adopted a mantra: “You are not in traffic; you are traffic.” Rather than seeing other cars as obstacles and other people as competitors, I’ve started to think of us all as one organism, as blood vessels in the arteries of the city. This changes the decisions I make. I can let others change lanes, and I can feel sympathy for the drivers who weave frantically between lanes only to wind up 10 feet ahead when the traffic thickens.

I am a humanities teacher, so my solution to the problem of my commute is about perspective, imagination, and emotion rather than design. This is how the humanities enrich our lives in the age of STEAM; they offer us the gift of empathy, of feeling with other people rather than seeing them as instruments or hindrances. Philosophical, literary, mythical, and historical thinking help us to see ourselves in relationship with others. With this crucial educational mission in mind, we are revamping the English curriculum to allow our juniors and seniors to choose English classes that address their lives— classes like Perfecting the Human, Revenge and Justice, and Religion and Literature. (Eventually, we hope, students will begin to make their own suggestions about possible electives, perhaps even collaborating with teachers to design a class.) These classes will choose texts according to theme, not geography, time, or a body of canonical texts, and they will extend the skills that our curriculum fosters: careful reading, effective writing and speaking, critical thinking.

At the same time, humanities skills are practical. They make possible the web of communications that most people’s workaday lives demand. Not only do students in the humanities learn to write and speak well, they develop the habit of thinking of things from multiple perspectives, incorporating the lives of others into their own considerations and asking productive questions. STEAM and the humanities interconnect. We anticipate that the students’ work in the STEAM areas—as they learn to create visual delights and useful machines of all sorts—will extend their abilities to create visual models and to design presentations in a variety of media. Our long-term projects in the humanities can thus become more multidisciplinary. Increasingly, students will use what they learn in STEAM classes to design demonstrations of their understanding of themes in humanities classes, and the skills that they learn in the humanities can inform their thinking and communication about the design process in STEAM. The changes are already underway. In the 8th grade, for instance, English, history, and science teachers are developing a project in which students research a social justice leader and design a monument to that leader. Eventually, students will make detailed models of their monuments in the Makerspace.

STEAM Lab student Michael Finn-Henry ’18 solders a speed controller to the brushless motor of his self-designed drone, which uses machine learning to autonomously identify and remove climbing holds from a rock gym wall.

David Barron/Oxygen Group Photography

A fully rounded education includes not only problem solving and project-building, but also reading, introspection, and discussion that put our daily activities into the context of a meaningful human life. Thus, I think of both my commute and my profession by way of Camus’ Sisyphus. Sisyphus, although forever condemned to the absurd labor of pushing an enormous rock up a steep hill, only to have that rock roll back down, turns to descend again and has one moment of joy during which he makes sense of the life that led him here. I imagine him glimpsing a Providence River sunrise frosting the underside of scudding clouds a radiant pink, and Sisyphus and I smile to be back at work.