Conceptual Framework for Non-Algorithmic Education in STEAM Education: Toward Metacognitive Strategies

Introduction

STEAM Education refers to the areas of science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics. STEAM education is a successful strategy for life. Individuals must be creative and have critical thinking skills. Competence development through art and artistic education is the way of non-algorithmic education, which includes, also, intuition and thinking. One the most important methods is reflexivity. In this process, the personality accumulates that experience which cannot be learned in contact with other phenomena/things. Acquiring knowledge through art becomes an inner experience through sensory-affective coverage, spiritual meditation over what has been received and fixed in memory, judgment from the intellect in relation with the scale of own spiritual values. Discovering and living interiority are two defining moments in the process of acquiring knowledge through art. Contemplating the artistic reality, we are insuring our access to our own being. In the process of acquiring knowledge through art, the inner living may gain amplitude and complexity, it is being continuously and lifelong constituted and elaborated. The personality’s inner value being can be built during the communication between man and art. It is the conclusion of the way of being of the Person in the context of life situations.

The artistic reflexivity is the inner artistic experience. In this chapter it is purposed to analyze artistic reflexivity and to determine its impact in the processuality of the educational-artistic act. The necessity of reflexivity in the process of art education has at base the supposition that the study of works of art can be extended beyond the aesthetic education framework. Through art can be formed and developed not only the artistic aptitudes. The potential artwork hides is inexhaustible possibility in the formation and development of personality, through reflexivity, which the artistic can get to know himself, to discover values, and to form their worldview and others.

This chapter is composed of five sections. The first section outlines the values of the elements of the process of artistic knowledge, the essence of the feelings in the act of the artistic knowledge and the necessity to gain experience for the development of the personality. The second section characterizes the artistic knowledge as a spiritual activity, and the work of art as a spiritual product. The conditions in which knowledge becomes inner experience through art are identified by reference to conscience. The third section, using the theory of multiple intelligences, establishes the value of the spiritual intelligence as well as its benefits in the development of the student’s personality. The philosophical and psychological dimensions of the concept of reflexivity are analyzed in the fourth section. Finally, the last section conducts a study of the concept of artistic reflexivity in the context of the educational -artistic process.