Monthly Archives: May 2025

An End to the Research?

Getting Started

As spring term at OSU ends, the 2024-2025 URSA engage program nears its end too. The Spring Poster Symposium has come and gone, the Fall Virtual Symposium will be done before the end of fall term, and then the 2025-2026 program will start. The offical end to the program is May 30th, just days away from the time this post being uploaded. However this does not mean my research (or the implications of my research) are going to end.

How the Arts makes classrooms more accessible isn’t just a research question made to check off a box for this program. It’s a question that holds weight for education and Art leaders and underserved students. It is my hope that, to some degree, my work on bringing connections between academic engagement with Arts integration could inspire change in the way people look at Art and its role in K-12 education. If people are able to see STEAM and educational Arts in a positive light when it comes to building accessible pathways for students, then perhaps our standards of education could one day change and soon our students of many backgrounds and abilities could flourish under curriculum crafted around accessibility and the Arts.

Why it Matters

Accessibility, Education, Getting Started, STEAM

In a traditional sense, Art education looks like finger painting, marching band, and musicals. For ages, Art has been separated from the typical classroom, it is seen not as a way of learning but as a break from other subjects. This way of thinking has caused damage to our students learning and prevents our schools from teaching the best they can. I believe that Art not only has a place in classrooms, but Art integration is also the way we can offer higher quality accessible education to the most students.

My research focuses on the ways in which STEAM instead of STEM can create classroom settings that encourage students of many different backgrounds and abilities to participate in learning on a level deeper than what is currently common practice. Through informal interviews with Arts and education leaders and reviewing modern and critical academic literature I can confidently conclude that non-English speaking/English-learning, disabled, and low-income students are able to engage with lessons on higher levels when taught with Art integration instead of typical methods used today.

Spring Poster Symposium

Getting Started, STEAM

May 20th is Oregon State Univeristy’s Spring Poster Symposium, where myself and other students who were apart of the URSA engage program will be presenting our research and findings to peers and the public. Traditionally, research is presented via a poster and short description of the research and findings to create intrest in the work being done. I’ll be presenting from 9 am to 10:30 am with a poster of my own.

I want to take a moment though to describe how the exclusion of the Arts isn’t just having a harmful impact on K-12 education, but how STEM instead of STEAM based education even made presenting my own research significantly more difficult than it needed to be.

OSU hosts poster workshops where students can get help creating their posters and working on pitches to present our research. While attending one such event in hopes to get some clarity on what our posters are meant to look like, I had asked for assistance on what kind of infographics and images to include. I was told to make a graph based on my work- something that wasn’t possible since my collected data was from informal interviews and academic literature on the topic. When I brought this up, I was met with disblief and told that should have some sort of quantitative research. Similarly, when I asked for assistance on what to include in a brief pitch of my work, I was told to open up with my most catching and interesting numbers, something I still did not have since my research is not merit based.

Through years of excluding the Arts in acadmeic spaces, people are left confused when approached with something other than numbers. My research on accessibility and the Arts is just as important as someone else’s research on water cleanliness or sheep DNA. Though because our world has shifted focus from all subjects to just those that can present numbers, we exclude important facts that could shape our futures. This is exactly why it is crucial that children are exposed to Art intergration as early as possible in their education, so their world view isn’t limited to just the numbers but also how these numbers changes lives.