Introduction
What is STREAM and why is it so important to Land Heritage Institute and Pon la Mesa?
STREAM stands for
Science
Technology
Reading | wRiting
Engineering | Environment
Arts
Math
STREAM is STEM (Science | Technology | Engineering | Math) teaching/learning with language arts (Reading/wRiting) and Arts in general added to the educational acronym.
Adding language arts (reading and writing) as curricular components is essential for any worthwhile educational program in San Antonio: San Antonio has the second highest illiteracy rate among major Texas cities; El Paso leads the group, and Austin has the lowest rate. There are 100,429 illiterate adults in San Antonio, 15.05% of the adult population. (www.idra.org)
LHI is developing the STREAM Center, a WWII-era Quonset hut once used by Ford Motors for testing tractors, as a trailhead for arriving school buses. It will be an educational ‘exploratorium,’ an orientation station where students start their sojourns onto the land--nature walks, history tours, insect illustration session, fitness hikes and bike rides. It will be a place to which they will return, a place where stories will stream. These stories will be captured on tablets, while talking, during discoveries at envisioned educational stations with microscopes and viz labs. These stories will stream into journals, onto sheets on the weird curved Quonset walls, in storytelling circles. They will be shared around the “mesa” of the Pon la Mesa installation behind the Quonset hut.
Pon la Mesa sits in the shadow of the STREAM Center. Pon la Mesa means Set the Table in Spanish. Pon la Mesa is an open-air, educative, art installation by San Antonio artist Jose Chapa. The piece evokes a family dining room, a place too where stories are shared. There is where themes will surface concerning land, plants, the food we eat, our families, our forms of fitness, what wellness means.
The Pon la Mesa curriculum found here gives provides a glimpse at how art can intersect with these themes to explore aspects of science, technology, engineering, the environment, the language arts and/or math (STREAM).