A Review of ACD-STEMM Integration
part 1: a taxonomy of
integrated bridges

Robert Root-Bernstein, Ania Pathak
and Michele Root-Bernstein

This is Part 1 of a three-part analysis of studies concerning
useful ways in which visual, plastic, musical and perform-
ing arts; crafts; and design (referred to for simplicity as arts-
crafts-design, or ACD) may be used to improve learning of
science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine
(STEMM) and increase professional success in these sub-
jects. We address the following questions: (1) What are the
ways in which ACD and STEMM can interact fruitfully?
(2) Which of these ways of interacting have been explored
using well-devised studies and what do those studies tell us
about efficacy? (3) Where are the gaps (and therefore the
opportunities) that can readily be addressed by new studies?
E (4) What kinds of methods can be used to generate reli-
able data about effective ACD-STEMM integration?

Part 1 summarizes studies demonstrating that ACD are
valuable to STEMM professionals, providing a taxonomy of
eight connecting “bridges” that STEMM professionals say
they employ to connect arts and science into “integrated net-
works of enterprise.” We demonstrate that STEMM profes-
sionals utilizing these bridges are significantly more likely
to achieve success than those who do not. These findings
make the issue of near and far transfer between ACD and
STEMM disciplines irrelevant: The question of far transfer
reduces to whether specific links between the two can be
found that create direct “near-transfer bridges” between “far-
apart” subjects.

To elaborate, we review studies that demonstrate a strong
correlation between success in STEMM careers and serious,
persistent avocational participation in ACD over a lifetime.
These studies range from personal accounts of how ACD
skills, knowledge, materiali, techniques and inventions have
inspired STEMM work to large-scale statistical studies in
which scientists, engineers and mathematicians correlate
ACD activities with various measures of STEMM success,
such as winning a Nobel prize, becoming a member of a Na-
tional Academy, filing patents or starting new companies.

Correlations are not, Ovviamente, causation. What one would
like to see are interventions demonstrating not only that

Robert Root-Bernstein* (educator), Department of Physiology, 567 Wilson Road,
Room 2201, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, U.S.A.
E-mail: rootbern@msu.edu.

Ania Pathak (researcher), Michigan State University Neuroscience Graduate Program,
Giltner Hall, 293 Farm Lane, Room 108, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
48824, U.S.A.; Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine, East Fee
Hall, 965 Fee Road, Room A136, East Lansing, MI 48824, U.S.A.
E-mail: pathakan@msu.edu.

Michele Root-Bernstein (educator), Department of Theatre, Michigan State University,
East Lansing, MI 48824, U.S.A. E-mail: rootber3@msu.edu.

*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed

Supplemental files associated with this issue are available at
www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/leon/52/5.

ACD can improve STEMM learning and performance but
also how they can do so. The second and third parts of this
extended abstract provide such evidence. Here we provide a
necessary framework for analyzing interventional studies by
examining the kinds of connections one might reasonably
expect to find between ACD and STEMM. Such a frame-
lavoro, generated from anecdotal and correlational studies
described above, utilizes connections between ACD and
STEMM that STEMM practitioners themselves believe to
be functional.

The ACD-STEMM framework we propose consists of

eight types of connections or “bridges”:

Bridge 1. Transdisciplinary tools for thinking. In Sparks
of Genius (1999), Root-Bernstein and Root-Bernstein previ-
ously investigated creative practice among hundreds of indi-
viduals drawn from ACD, STEMM, humanities and literary
professions to derive a set of cognitive skills of universal util-
ità. These “thinking tools”—observing, imaging, abstracting,
pattern recognition, pattern-forming, analogizing, modello-
ing, dimensional thinking, empathizing or play-acting,
kinesthetic or body thinking, playing, transforming and
synthesizing—form process connections across disciplines.
Bridge 2. ACD implements, methods and materials.
Bridge 2 focuses on physical implements, metodi
of using them and materials to which they are applied as use-
ful connectors between ACD and STEMM practices.

Bridge 3. ACD-generated phenomena. Sometimes art-
ist, working as artists, discover or invent new phenomena
that STEMM professionals have never encountered before,
which then become the focus of STEMM research.

Bridge 4. ACD principles and structures. Artists some-
times discover new principles governing natural phenomena
or invent new kinds of structures that have STEMM appli-
cations.

Bridge 5. Experience with the creative process. ACD and
STEMM professionals often assert that the creative process of
defining new challenges, developing relevant skills, exploring
and testing possibilities, and conveying the results to a public
audience is universal across disciplines. Process skills learned
in ACD transfer to STEMM.

Bridge 6. Transdisciplinary aesthetic principles.

STEMM professionals often identify aesthetics as a motiva-
tion for their work and as valid criteria for the development
and analysis of STEMM research and results. By aesthetics,
they mean the same thing ACD professionals mean: a syn-
thetic melding of sense and sensibility, of technique and pas-
sion, of content and form, leading to an experience of beauty.
Bridge 7. Mnemonic devices; recording and commu-
nication techniques. Remembering, recording and com-
municating information are essential elements of STEMM
expertise that ACD can stimulate and enhance.

Bridge 8. Recreation leading to re-creation. Recreation
refers to the act of getting away from one’s work to recharge
energy and reclaim motivation. When it includes play (one
of the thinking tools described in Bridge 1), ACD recreation
may involve exploring new ideas, skills, materiali, techniques
and/or problems of practical or inspirational use in STEMM.

492 LEONARDO, Vol. 52, No. 5, pag. 492– 493, 2019

https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01579 ©2017 ISAST

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In such a case, ACD recreation can lead to STEMM re-
creation.

In light of the specific and varied ways in which STEMM
professionals have utilized ACD, it becomes clear that an
enlightened approach to curricular integration requires
two things: (1) breaking down the specific types of skills or
knowledge developed in any particular ACD project and
(2) ascertaining how these may overlap with skills and knowl-
edge required in a STEMM subject. Hypotheses that “the arts
will make STEMM professionals more creative” are simply
too broad and amorphous to be testable or implementable
and have no empirical basis. Equally important, since differ-
ent STEMM professionals use different aspects of ACD for
different reasons, there can be no “one-size-fits-all” approach
to ACD-STEMM integration. Integration must be discipline-
appropriate and, ultimately, individual-appropriate.

Finalmente, we argue that the bridges framework makes the
ongoing debate about near and far transfer irrelevant to un-
derstanding ACD-STEMM integration. The issue concerns
whether skill and knowledge transfer can be successfully
achieved between disciplines as apparently disparate as, Dire,
mathematics and poetry or music and biology, as it clearly
can be between closely related areas such as still-life drawing
and industrial drawing. In the absence of defined bridges
between subjects, we argue that “far transfer” is impossible.
STEMM professionals almost always point to specific ways
in which their ACD and STEMM practices connect through
one of the eight types of bridges. Bridges create links that
draw “far” disciplines into “near” proximity.

Manuscript received 31 Marzo 2016.

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