Category Archives: Getting Started

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.

What is Accessibility and what does it look like?

Accessibility, Education, Getting Started

Accessibility has many different definitions and can look very different depending on the way in which it is being applied to situations and environments. Marriam-Webster’s definition is: something ‘being within reach or easy to understand’, which might not be where your mind first goes when thinking about accessibility. It’s more than likely that most of us think about accessibility strictly in the context of disability. Wikipedia’s definition of accessibility is: “…the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities.” While accessibility does include making technology and the environment available to people with disabilities, it can also mean so much more. In rural areas, accessibility can look like the ease of getting from place to place (think about driving from your home to the hospital or a grocery store. If it isn’t very far, then these places are accessible to you) In big cities it can be the availability of sidewalks and public transit to the public. Accessibility can even be the price of goods so more people can afford them or the language written on important road signs.

Accessibility can look like just about anything that affects the availability of a thing or place to people. Everyone, in one way or another, is affected by accessibility. Even children in public schools depend on their education being accessible, meaning they need; extracurricular classes and sports to have an accessible price, for classes to be spoken and written in languages they understand, and for schools to be an accessible distance from home and have accessible bus systems. But that can be a lot to tackle, and it covers so many topics.

So, for the purposes of my research, here is the definition I’ll be using for accessibility in school in the context of STEAM. ‘The ability for non-English speaking, disabled, and impoverished students to engage with and understand materials at the same capacity their English speaking, able-bodied, and non-impoverished peers do‘. In this context, accessibility looks like having a bilingual instructor, having low-cost or no-cost art courses and activities for public schools, or making art tools like paintbrushes and scissors usable for students with low-grip capacity.

Who is my URSA mentor?

Getting Started

Along with being my mentor during the 2025 URSA engage program, Victor is an educator and technologist who has been helping under-served K-12 students learn about STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) for 30 years. Upon looking into him, you’ll likely find his profile on the OSU extension service website. This website gives a brief introduction into the work Victor focuses on like; robotics, drones, puppets, and storytelling. It’s not too hard to also find information about Victor on his Linkedin and Instagram. These sites describe Victor’s passion and work with technology, art, and education.

Who is Leaf?

Getting Started

I’m a first year undergraduate student, majoring in Environmental Science at the Corvallis campus of Oregon State University! I want to use the Arts to communicate scientific fact. Writing, painting, and design are passions of mine. I wanted to join this research opportunity through OSU’s Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and the Arts (URSA) with Victor because I believe that how we interact and view art as children impacts our values and beings for the rest of our lives. I hope that throughout this program I am able to gain new perspectives about the influence that creative spaces have on children as they grow into adults. By the end of this first week I’ll hopefully have a clear and narrow research question nailed down!