Social and Emotional Teaching for STEAM Through Read-Aloud: Kindergarteners Learning to “Feel Courage-Able”

Introduction

In the past decade, the National Science Foundation has advocated for increased attention to the linkages between science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in education programming that adheres to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) (NGSS Lead States, 2013) and increases the competitiveness of the American workforce (Bilimoria, 2019; National Academy of Science, 2010). Before STEM education was able to become the status quo in K-12 classrooms, STEAM education initiatives emerged to add a focus on the arts as an additional field that emphasizes design, problem solving, and creativity (Henriksen et al., 2019). While researchers and theorists have challenged how an integrated emphasis on five distinct fields might conflate the differences between these disciplines (Angier, 2010) STEAM education is enthusiastically endorsed by many parents, teachers, administrators, and policymakers who view it as a pathway toward deeper learning and economic advantages (Jolly, 2014).

STEAM learning presents unique demands which have been explored, in part, through the research lens of disciplinary literacy (Shanahan et al., 2011; Shanahan et al., 2016). Currently, there is an increasing understanding of the role of reading and writing as learning tools across these disciplines; the push toward disciplinary literacy emphasizes that students must learn to use language in the ways scientists, engineers, and mathematician do in order to participate with authority in these fields (Shanahan et al., 2011). In addition, STEAM learning requires a unique set of social and emotional knowledges that young people must develop in order to manage the challenges of these fields, including the ability to collaborate, persistence, and attention to social responsibility (Sundquist, 2019). Notably, while many initiatives have emerged to encourage underrepresented and marginalized students to gain interest in STEM fields, recruitment has proven easier than retention (Basile & Lopez, 2015; Xie et al., 2015). Women and people of color leave STEM professions at rates higher than their peers, in part due to feelings of being excluded (Riegel-Crumb et al., 2019), which suggests more social and emotional knowledge may be needed. In this challenging setting, we argue that persistence, a capacity for collaboration, and a sense of responsibility are key to success for all students, but especially those from marginalized backgrounds (Sundquist, 2019).

One way teachers can engage students with the unique social and emotional learning (SEL) challenges of STEAM is to use read-alouds to invite students to build the social and emotional capacity needed to succeed in these fields (Thompson & Melchoir, 2020). Literacy teachers have long realized that reading a shared text aloud, discussing and interacting around it, and reaching back toward its themes and lessons across the day is one of the richest literacy learning experiences available (Laminack, 2017). This is especially true in early childhood classrooms, where students’ listening vocabularies and conceptual understandings can dramatically exceed the texts they can efficiently and accurately decode (Lammert et al., 2020). Read-alouds allow learners to go beyond the mechanics of reading development toward rich and varied experiences with sophisticated stories that can support SEL (Thompson & Melchoir, 2020).