Enhancing STEAM Education Through Cultivating Students’ Savoring Capacity

Interdisciplinary integration and the cultivation of innovation skills are important core competencies in STEAM education. Given major sociotechnical challenges of our twenty-first century, a state of wide-awakeness is a central component in processes of problem framing and creative thinking. Savoring, an aspect of wide-awakeness, is a self-regulatory response that involves a person’s awareness/perception of his/her inner states: savoring has been shown to affect creativity. In this chapter, we discuss, in two parts, how school support systems can help cultivate their students’ savoring and creative abilities within the context of interdisciplinary STEAM education. First, we present results of an investigation of factors driving the demand-pull innovation in cultivating creativity. These factors involve students’ ability to savor (through anticipation, enjoying the moment, and reminiscence). We then show how a student’s savoring capacity affects individual creativity, and how student perceived support for creativity affects their individual creativity through savoring. Second, we explore relationships between students’ creative self-efficacy, savoring capacity, and individual creativity, and explain how school support for creativity enhances these relationships. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications for maximizing student creativity through STEAM education.