In recent years, global society has faced important challenges that have severely undermined its fundamental values and principles: increased global competition, migration, climate change, environmental threats, economic crises, Covid-19 pandemic, and wars. In this scenario, the social value of science has been strengthened as an expression of an interconnected knowledge on which it is necessary to invest in the perspective of active citizenship and sustainable development.

People all over the world need to understand the changes caused by human activity on Earth, and to find a solution to guarantee the peaceful coexistence of human being and living things. Mathematical, technical, and scientific competences are fundamental to solve a range of problems in everyday situations and to explain the natural world by observation and experimentation.

Ever since Yakman first used the acronym of STEAM at the beginning of the 21st century, STEAM has become a buzzword in the field of education, despite it being a complex and controversial notion (Martín-Gordillo, 2019; Perignat & Katz-Buonincontro, 2019). The interest in this field can be traced back to the 1990s when the US National Science Foundation (NSF) formally included engineering and technology with science and mathematics in undergraduate and K-12 school education (National Science Foundation, 1998). It coined the acronym SMET (science, mathematics, engineering, and technology) that was subsequently replaced by STEM (Christenson, 2011). However, a consensus has not been reached on the disciplines included within STEM (Li et al., 2020).

Further ambiguities have emerged in the transition from STEM to STEAM. The difference between STEAM and STEM (Martín-Páez et al., 2019) lies in the inclusion of the A for arts, which encompasses various disciplines belonging to the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts (Bautista, 2021).

Despite STEAM education is considered a priority in the international educational policies, and upon of increased labour market demand for qualified scientific skills, there are still difficulties in teaching STEAM: low attractiveness from students, strong gender bias in the approach to these subjects and in the careers development, lack of inclusion of disadvantaged people.

So, the main purposes of STEAM education is:

1. attracting more students and teachers to STEAM education through a global approach from primary to adult education;
2. breaking down the barriers between subjects to integrate school curriculum and vocational guidance;
3. developing teacher training activities to improve the quality of STEAM education;
4. reducing the inequalities in the access of scientific studies and carriers for women, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities.

STEAM Education is characterized by seeking meaningful learning, eliciting students’ convergent and divergent thinking (Yakman & Lee, 2012). STEAM is also characterized by granting students an active, constructive, and critical role in their learning and fostering collaborative work, while the teacher adopts the roles of advisor, counselor and/or guide (Thuneberg et al., 2018).

The paper describes a research project aimed to enhance the teaching of STEAM in the secondary education, focusing on the development of innovative pedagogical strategies using musical and artistic approaches, such as sonification.

Sonification is defined as the encoding of data into nonspeech sounds organized by an algorithm which ensures an objective, systematic, reproducible, and repeatable output (Hermann, 2008).  In the last three decades, literature has presented a lot of examples of the relevance of the associations between sounds and science (Godwin, 1992). Several sonification strategies are documented in STEM education. Basically, all these strategies imply the use of digital sound and computer aided output (Supper, 2015), although the use of body percussion and instrumental performance of sonification is also attested (Eramo et al., 2022).

The research is included in the qualitative research paradigm firstly interested to the investigation of students’ and teachers’ conceptions of STEAM education. In May 2022, 4 sonification workshops were done in a Southern Italian’s high school. Data were collected through 6 focus-groups interviews undertaken respectively with 2 classes composed by 41 students and 7 experts involved in the sonification workshops focused on learning minerology and biology through auditory software and body percussion. The focus-group interview track for students comprised 6 questions divided in 3 main sections:  student perceptions of science learning;  practices of science teaching;  results of the sonification workshops. The focus groups interviews were arranged in person. The interviews were recorded as audio and data was then transcribed and analysed. As a starting point, the results considered each of the above-mentioned sections. Most of the interviewed students reported different definitions of science, ranging from a simplistic interpretation to a more sophisticated. Students’ active involvement was the most frequently positive aspect of the sonification experience reported by our interviewees. Referring to the relationship between music and science, students reported that music makes scientific learning more interesting and facilitates the understanding of complex concepts. However, some students reported that music is useful only as a memorization strategy. When asked to reflect on the relationship about the gender gap and science achievements, participants had very different perceptions. While some students affirmed to not see this problem in their school, other students reported teachers’ stereotypes in the assessment. However, in both cases, music was not considered as an effective solution to reduce the gender gap. For students, the weaknesses of the experience referred to two main aspects: the length of time of the proposed activities (realized in the afternoon), and the imbalance between theory and practice. Reflecting on the implementation of the sonification model, the experts recognized the need to better align their activities with school’s curriculum design and teachers’ learning goals. Furthermore, the sonification strategies would be more responsive to students’ learning needs, especially in terms of classroom management. Another important aspect to consider is the musical competences of students. Having students with a different music literacy can be challenging for experts and discriminating for students. Thus, the activities must be carefully planned and developed, to design a rigorous teaching model of STEAM education that can be disseminated and implemented in the national and international school system.

This research aimed to contribute to a deeper understanding of school factors that foster learning of scientific subjects, developing a “soundtrack” of natural phenomena and processes that can be used to create aural models for educational purposes. The main findings we found concern the evidence that music make learning more motivating and fun. At the same time, research in this field must continue to explore the connection between students’ aspirations and scientific attitudes and achievements. Moote et al. (2020) use the term aspiration to refer to the future-orientated hopes and ambitions, recognizing that the nature and content of aspirations can vary widely between individuals and across time and place. For instance, Mujtaba and Reiss (2016) found that school experiences shaped student aspirations to continue with physics and/or math. Despite the growing corpus of STEAM research, the prevailing educational model in schools, especially in secondary education, continues to be the disciplinary model, where curriculum subjects are taught independently and in isolation (Bautista et al., 2018). In fact, one of the fundamental barriers towards STEAM is the low level of teachers’ preparation to design and deliver integrated curricula, within equipped school contexts. In this perspective, STEAM education must be improved to enhance the value of scientific thought that, far from being a corpus of dogmatic information, constitutes a mental habitus that connects principles and rules to solve problems even in the professional life. Thus, teacher education is certainly fundamental to help teachers to reinforce the creative, flexible, critical, logical, and complex thinking that they should promote in their students. There is no doubt that, without a radical change in the way technological and scientific subjects are taught, it will always be difficult to encourage especially disadvantaged students to choose to work in science.

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