When I first encountered STEAM education, I thought I understood why the A had been added.

At least, I thought I did.

Like many educators, I understood the theory. Art Εducation brought creativity into STEM. It encouraged innovation, helped students visualise ideas, express their thinking and connect different disciplines. I had even designed activities that combined science with creative expression, convinced that I had experienced what the Visual Arts could offer within a STEAM approach.

I was wrong. Not because that understanding was incorrect. Simply because it was incomplete.

The turning point came during the SPIRIT project when I had the opportunity to participate in an actual art lesson. Interestingly, the activity itself wasn’t new to me. It was the recycled paper activity that I had already facilitated in other subjects. I had used it through language lessons and other learning contexts before.

But something was different.

It wasn’t the activity that had changed.

It was the environment.

Suddenly, the usual boundaries seemed to disappear. Curriculum constraints felt lighter. Time was experienced differently. There was space to explore, create, experiment and simply remain with an idea for longer. Teachers weren’t trying to “fit” creativity into the lesson. Creativity had become the lesson.

It felt… free.

And with that freedom came something I hadn’t fully appreciated before: depth.

For the first time, I began to see the unique potential of the art classroom—not as a place separate from science, mathematics or engineering, but as a space capable of giving those subjects room to breathe. Through a STEAM mindset, the Visual Arts don’t simply decorate learning. They expand what learning can become.

If that was my first realisation, the second was even more personal.

Around the same time, I began taking my own small steps into art.

Nothing extraordinary.

Just enough to realise something uncomfortable.

For years, I had quietly carried the belief that I simply wasn’t an artistic person.

Intellectually, I knew that creativity wasn’t reserved for a gifted few. I would have happily encouraged any child to explore, create and express themselves.

Yet somewhere inside, I had excluded myself from that invitation.

And that made me wonder.

How many children quietly believe the same thing?

How many grow up thinking, “Art just isn’t for me”?

Not because anyone explicitly told them so, but because somewhere along the way they began comparing their creativity to someone else’s talent.

That thought has stayed with me.

Because when we reduce the Arts to drawing well, singing beautifully or performing confidently, we risk closing a door that should remain open for every child.

The Arts are so much more than that.

They help us imagine.

They help us communicate.

They help us make sense of ideas that words sometimes cannot capture.

And, perhaps most surprisingly for me, they can also help us heal.

Until recently, I knew very little about the growing evidence behind art therapy and the ways creative expression can support emotional wellbeing and trauma recovery when guided by trained professionals. Discovering this opened yet another door in my thinking. If creative expression can help people process difficult experiences later in life, what role might it play much earlier—during childhood—as part of an education that values expression, reflection and belonging?

I don’t pretend to know the answer.

But I now find myself asking very different questions than I did before joining SPIRIT.

Perhaps that, more than anything else, is what this project gave me.

Not certainty.

Curiosity.

Today, when I look at the A in STEAM, I no longer see it simply as Arts.

I see possibility.

Possibility to connect disciplines.

Possibility to connect people.

Possibility to discover parts of ourselves we didn’t know were there.

And if one project could transform my own understanding of the Arts so profoundly, I cannot help but wonder…

What possibilities might open for the children who experience them from the very beginning?