Integrating knowledge about color within the STEM/STEAM approach: some instructional procedural principles

This article aims to help define the STEM/STEAM approach to color education. Traditional science education seems to fail in addressing the stubborn misconceptions about color vision detected by empirical research. On the contrary, a knowledge integration approach like STEM/STEAM could provide a well-suited educational perspective for dealing with interdisciplinary issues related to color teaching and learning. Nowadays more and more schools welcome this educational paradigm as it seems to meet properly the needs of our modern knowledge society. However, this approach is somewhat ambiguous to the extent that a variety of teaching activities fall under the STEM/STEAM label. Our original contribution is to attempt to improve the conceptualization of the "STEM/STEAM approach" by identifying some instructional procedural principles that may be useful in operationally defining what we mean by "integration". Methodologically, our research consisted of three phases. In the first phase, we identified some shared features of activities classified as STEM/STEAM that we defined as the “invariants” of the STEM/STEAM approach. In the second phase, the invariants were described in terms of didactic variables drawn from the literature and some STEM/STEAM teaching activities. In the third phase, some procedural principles to guide teachers' work were formulated and discussed with reference to color teaching situations.