Brief: Project lead on an international arts and education initiative used historic train stations in Phnom Penh and Vancouver, alongside cross‑disciplinary art projects, to connect STEAM learning with social history and identity in Cambodia and Canada.
Date: 2021–2022
Outcome: Cambodian students participated in hands‑on STEAM activities, discovering that learning can be creative, interdisciplinary and socially meaningful, while community members in both countries encountered public artworks and performances in stations, galleries and virtual spaces.
Full STEAM Ahead links art and STEM through train‑station metaphors, empowering Cambodian youth and fostering Canada–Cambodia dialogue via transformative, cross‑cultural STEAM education initiatives.
Youth experience firsthand that learning can be creative, interdisciplinary and socially relevant. At the same time, communities in Cambodia and Canada engage with public art that sparks reflection on modernisation, STEM/STEAM, historical injustices and ongoing reconciliation.
Full STEAM Ahead: Arts & Education Project 2021–2022, a 14‑month initiative by Cambodian Children’s Fund (CCF) that uses art to deepen and extend STEM into STEAM, linking Cambodia with Canada through parallel arts projects centered on historic train stations.
Cambodian Children’s Fund is transitioning from STEM to STEAM by weaving visual, performance, language, and physical arts into its already high‑performing STEM curriculum, aiming to equip students for Cambodia’s fast‑changing, technology‑driven economy with not only technical skills but also creativity, critical thinking, and whole‑person development.
Art is used as a deliberate bridge to help students explore and understand science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in more imaginative and accessible ways, framed by a unifying narrative that links the country’s industrial past to its emerging digital future through historic train stations and steam trains.
Through this work, the project builds strong local and international partnerships, particularly with Canadian artists in The Thought Train Collective, while engaging the wider community in exhibitions, performances, and interactive projects that spark conversations about STEAM, history, identity, and social issues beyond the classroom.
The Canadian connection in “Full STEAM Ahead” is anchored in a rich partnership between Cambodian Children’s Fund and Vancouver‑based artists working under The Thought Train Collective. Centred around Engine 374 Pavilion at the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre, Canadian artists use the history of Canada’s first transcontinental train arrival to explore themes of industrialisation, colonisation, Indigenous displacement and Chinese labour on the railway.
Parallel to Cambodia’s use of its historic train station, this setting frames workshops, installations and youth projects that interrogate the legacy of the “Iron Horse.” Works such as Zoran Dragelj’s experimental video and the FULL CIRCLE window installation by Connie Sabo and Charlene Vickers visually and conceptually dialogue with Cambodian projects like Hives & Hexagons and drawing robots.
The collaboration culminates in a shared virtual gallery and live, linked performances in Phnom Penh and Vancouver, positioning Canada–Cambodia exchange as a core engine of the project’s STEAM vision.
There needs to be more than STEM education to satisfy the demands of the twenty-first-century economy. Students require more to flourish in a quickly changing world.
It was time to make a difference – and put the Arts into learning!
Future Headspace 