The overall aim of the project is to develop a STEAM roadmap for science education in Horizon Europe. This EU-funded project will provide a plan of action that will provide guidance to EU's key funding programme for research and innovation on how to encourage more interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) through the use of artistic approaches, involving creative thinking and applied arts (the “A” in ‘STEAM’).

The consortium aims to provide Europe with this roadmap, through:

• Collaboration and co-creation with the stakeholder communities of science education, research, innovation and creativity, through intensive exchange, dialogue and mutual learning among them which will produce better knowledge and shared understandings of the relevant opportunities, challenges and needs.
• A bottom-up approach emphasizing educational practice and practitioners’ agency rather than high-level conceptualizations of STEAM and generic top-down for its adoption in science education.
• A specific focus on ways to leverage the power of STEAM approaches, as manifested through exemplary cases and best practices, so as to enable a bridging of open science and open schooling which can catalyse an increased impact for science education as a crucial tool for addressing Europe’s current scientific and societal challenges.

The originality of Road-STEAMer resides in its overall approach to the development of the STEAM roadmap that will triangulate the knowledge gained from the stakeholder engagement and the analysis of the STEAM practices with the knowledge produced from the analysis of the current educational policies, contexts and frameworks.

The team of the Department of Design of the Politecnico di Milano consists of Francesca Rizzo and Sabrina Bresciani who bring expertise in design, roadmapping, and collaborative approaches to policy making (integrating bottom-up and top-down knowledge). The team’s contribution to the project is focused on facilitating the collaborative development of the STEAM policy roadmap through co-creation workshops with policymakers and stakeholders at local, regional and national scale.

Funding: Horizon 2020 project number 101058405 (HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ERA-01-70)