{"id":99193,"date":"2019-06-24T09:15:43","date_gmt":"2019-06-24T13:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/?p=99193"},"modified":"2020-01-07T15:09:16","modified_gmt":"2020-01-07T20:09:16","slug":"stem-and-language-arts-two-sides-of-the-same-coin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/stem-and-language-arts-two-sides-of-the-same-coin\/","title":{"rendered":"STEM and language arts \u2014 two sides of the same coin?"},"content":{"rendered":"
What comes to mind when you think of a Google employee? Chances are, someone with superior technical skills and a penchant for coding. And while that may be true for Google\u2019s top engineers and designers, <\/span>a 2013 study<\/a> by the company found that the higher up employees go on the corporate ladder, the less important tech-savviness is \u2014 and the more important are skills such as communication, critical thinking and even empathy.<\/span><\/p>\n So what does this mean for college students? Is it worthwhile to focus on developing communication skills? We asked Professor Tyler Fisher<\/a> from the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures<\/a> what he thinks.<\/p>\n Dr. Tyler Fisher is a Spanish<\/a> professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures<\/a> and the Burnett Honors College<\/a>.<\/p>\n Do you agree that STEM and language arts are complementary skills? <\/strong><\/p>\n They can be, yes. Students who develop a narrow specialization in one STEM area could profoundly benefit from developing skills in a second or third language. Doing so would equip them to communicate aspects of their specialist, technical expertise into that target language.<\/p>\n And for their part, students of languages would benefit from acquiring first-hand awareness of one or more STEM disciplines. At the very least, they would gain a working knowledge of the scientific method. I relish the \u201cpermission\u201d that language learning grants us to consider any and every field of human knowledge \u2014 and to consider those fields at their most fundamental (their technology, lingo and jargon) and their most innovative (how to express the latest developments on the furthest frontier of a STEM field, for example.)<\/p>\n