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.
