STEM, STEAM, STREAM: North Texas Experts Discuss Why Education Matters to Business

In this three-part series, experts talk about the state of STEM, STEAM, and STREAM education in Dallas-Fort Worth—and what it means to our future workforce.

In Part One, these leaders tackle how to define STEM and also identify opportunities to come together to fuel the talent pipeline.

When it comes to business, education matters.

Moving into the digital age means that a STEM curriculum of science, technology, engineering, and math is a foundation for a robust, high-tech workforce. As a burgeoning tech hub, North Texas is overflowing with changemakers driving this dialogue.

Dallas Innovates brought eight experts across sectors together for a three-part series to talk about how that’s going to happen and where we’re at as a region.

Some of their projects stand alone and others cross-pollinate through creative collaborations. Each has a unique perspective on the significant impact education can have on the workforce, along with the actions that need to be taken to drive meaningful change. But they’re all in agreement: Learning is being reinvented. It’s time to collectively do something about it here, and beyond.

The interest of local students and the business community are directly aligned, says panel moderator Drexell Owusu, Senior Vice President of Education & Workforce at Dallas Regional Chamber.

Hilary Jackson, Capital One Financial Services’ vice president of technology agrees. “It requires an ecosystem of people working together to create a positive change, which is why we are passionate about building partnerships and facilitating conversations that will turbo-charge innovation, especially around our future workforce,” Jackson says.

Capital One has a desire to be a convener in the community, bringing together all sectors—educators, nonprofits, corporations, the city, and small businesses—to elevate Dallas-Fort Worth as a vibrant place to live, work, and create, she adds. “Together, we can get the next generation future-ready and attract world-class talent to our region beginning with the core components of STEM, STEAM, and STREAM.”

That can mean sparking an innate interest in students early on to prime them for a later career. From 2017 to 2027, growth is anticipated to be 14 percent in STEM jobs, Sorabh Saxena, President of Global Operations & Services at AT&T Business, says.

STEM is “cool” these days because nothing works without technology anymore, our panelists agree.

An aspect that Saxena believes is vital, beyond the interrelationship between tech and creativity, is fluidity between disciplines. But, as Oswaldo Alvarenga, DISD’s Executive Director of STEM, puts it, it’s okay for those to look different. And for Dallas ISD, social-emotional learning is tied to STEM.

Education boils down to creating valuable life skills, Dr. Jason Treadway, Director of the STEM Institute at DCCCD, says. Problem-solving, critical thinking, communication—it’s all a funnel to the same dissertation, To him, the bulk of STEM occupations require middle skills, so it’s up to us to do a better job of helping the general public understand that demand, as is done by their regional site STEMinsight.org.

Tread lightly though, Dr. Stephanie Knight, SMU’s Leon Simmons Endowed Dean, says. If we keep adding things to STEM, we might forget the basic needs of conceptual rigor and learning. Visualize how you want STEM to look in the classroom and lean into that.

And we can also take that a step further—expanding the idea that everything has to have STEM to include everyone having equal access to it.

“Everyone is a STEM person and every space is a STEM space,” Dr. Koshi Dhingra says. “STEM equals robotics. STEM equals coding. I’m not saying stop doing that. That’s great, but we need to think beyond that.”

Dr. Dhingra, the founder and director of talkSTEM, thinks we need to work backwards in order to achieve a truly diverse workforce. Graduates need to have agility, flexibility, and depth in order to fulfill what today’s companies want. That also means everyone is represented—but the nice thing about Dallas, she says, is that we already have all of the ingredients. We just have to use them.

Approaching STEM with a lens of equity is essential, according to the president and CEO of Big Thought, Byron Sanders. With a lack of representation comes a lack of role models, which leads to the absence of belonging. Addressing institutional barriers has to happen; if we don’t do this, he says, marginalized communities won’t have access to the same idealized American Dream that others do.

As Jennifer Sampson, the president and CEO of United Way of Metropolitan Dallas, points out, the university path might not be right one for all students. There’s a myriad of jobs available without a degree that can lead to a successful climb up the career ladder. But, she asks, “How do we build the workforce for the future and connect young people to really good jobs?”

One way is through the numerous partnerships these people have formed together. United Way has partnerships already in place with DCCCD and Big Thought—and that’s among the multitude of other integrations gathered around Dallas Innovates’ roundtable.

While their views—and definitions—of approaching STEM, STEAM, and STREAM vary, all of the trailblazers agreed: The time is now for Dallas-Fort Worth to be advantageous about its approach to learning. The pieces are already in place. But where do we begin?

Our panelists had a lot of ideas—but they agree, a good place to start includes broader discussions such as our STEM, STEAM, STREAM roundtable. Throughout the next few weeks, you’ll get a deeper dive into some of these calls to action, starting with the opportunities already here in the region.

We’ll give you a hint how it ends, though: All our panelists agreed to get together and pick each other’s brains more. Because this is important, and it’s only the beginning of pushing the boulder up the hill to impact North Texas, and beyond.

In Part One, our experts discuss just what STEM is, and what it means to add an arts and reading component—STEAM and STREAM. It’s a large conversation. As SMU’s Dr. Stephanie Knight points out, “I have encountered in STREAM three “R”s. Is it reading? Is it reasoning? Or it is religion?” 

Meet the eight innovators who tackle these topics and share what they’re working on, as well as the opportunities they see in the region. 

 

View the full article by Dallas Innovates.