STEAM Modules Module 1: What is STEM?
Overview – STEM and STEAM as literate practice
When we think about STEM/STEAM as a cross disciplinary focus, we can reflect on the ways pedagogies and content knowledge can come together. We can consider the ubiquity of the internet and other digital technologies on our daily lives, the practices required to work with the internet and other digital technologies, the nature of change within the digital space, the multimodal and multifaceted of digital technologies, and so on.
Through the lens of literate practices (Barton & Hamilton, 2005) we can also think about STEM/STEAM in a social context – in the ways people interact with other people and resources to participate in the world. Specifically, we are reminded of the creative and interactive nature of being digitally literate, and about the internet as a social system – without people, the system doesn’t operate. And it’s the interactions between and among the people, resources, and spaces across time and geographies the meaning is produced, shared, responded to and taken up.
We know the ways we are required to be literate are increasingly broad, particularly when technology is in the mix. But we also know there is a tendency in current policy to narrow and “pare back” curriculum with the aim of achieving a closer focus on mastery of specific “skills” in preparation for their use at another time.
How can these things sit together? Can we be critical thinkers and producers if we aren’t encouraged to develop those propensities within the school setting? What’s the effect when we narrow our teaching to a set of skills for mastery?
How do you feel about STEM/STEAM and the pedagogies for working with children? What are you excited about? What concerns you? How are you thinking about the priorities in government today where the rhetoric seems to be that we will learn the skills today and then do the critical thinking later? Can we do that?
So many questions! In this module, we will draw out information from experts in STEM/STEAM research and practice. They will offer us insights into the nature of STEM/STEAM approaches, they will share their favourite stories and experiences and offer advice.
Task:
Before we get started, take a moment to reflect on some of those questions we just posed and record (not for sharing) your initial feelings about STEM pedagogies and practices. We can use these later once you’ve had a chance to engage with the modules.
What do preservice teachers say?
We know from the research literature that many teachers lack the confidence and capacity to teach using STEM/STEAM approaches, and hence they steer away. We wanted to know if preservice teachers felt the same way – and if so, to investigate what we might do about that.
We surveyed over 100 preservice teachers at the University of Wollongong and at California State University Dominguez Hills in an anonymous survey about their attitudes and perceptions about STEM/STEAM. Particularly we wanted to know about young children’s learning – we know that the brain is in its greatest period of growth in the first decade of a child’s life, and so the need to teach critical thinking and problem-solving skills early is key to better life trajectories.
Note in this graph that our participants agreed that children in the first three years of school should learn about STEM (red) and that teachers should teach it (purple). However, most preservice teachers disagreed or were neutral about having confidence in their pedagogical knowledge (blue) and confidence in their content knowledge (green) sufficient to teach it.
This finding was repeated in connection with STEAM (the addition of The Arts to STEM learning). From these graphs we can infer two things:
- The preservice teachers who complete our survey valued both STEM and STEAM, however felt uncertain about their capacity to teach it.
- The preservice teachers perhaps saw little difference between STEM and STEAM and/or they felt equally about their capacity to teach either.
The students were also invited to share personal opinions and experiences related to STEM/STEAM. Those responses in offered more insights into this disconnect between wanting to teach STEM/STEAM and having the confidence to teach it.
In relation to confidence, examples include:
- I don’t feel very confident in STEM/STEAM as I am not a very creative person and feel as if on PEX it has always been left to a specialised RFF teacher (that is a different teacher who visits a classroom to replace the classroom teacher from face to face teaching).
- The science subjects are what has me not confident. On my Pracs (school placements) the schools did RFF or outsourced the Science subject so I haven’t had experience in this field of education.
…perhaps this outsourcing of science to other teachers is an indication of hesitancy within the inservice population of teachers as well.
Other preservice teachers shared personal fears related to pedagogies:
- For me it’s a logistical fear, how to manage 28 little people engaging in these tasks. It’s almost too much to manage.
- I am unaware of the pedagogical decisions surrounding stem as a whole, let alone for K-2 students.
- I’m worried about how to make it engaging, knowing what is developmentally appropriate to teach them.
Other fears related to knowledge of the content:
- I am more confident in maths than science and technology.
- I have understanding of basic and fundamental skills in those topics, but not enough to teach STEM or STEAM.
- My real weakness is technology as I was not taught coding or other complex technology skills at uni or high school.
And finally, one comment took us back to the concept of mandated curriculum and implications of centralised government decisions about what must be taught in schools:
- As a preservice teacher it’s the content that makes me most nervous and you lean on the syllabus to give you the first steer. As STEM/STEAM aren’t explicitly in the NSW Syllabus it’s then hard to arm yourself with ways to bring it into the classroom through the available KLAs – Maths, Science, Arts – where there are syllabus documents to guide us.
The word cloud below captures the frequency of words preservice teachers used to express their sense of confidence about teaching STEM/STEAM. Perhaps there’s something in there that resonates with you.
Would you like to share your views? How do you feel? You can respond via this Google Form.
What do experts say? What is STEM?
We interviewed a range of experts in the field of STEM. Some were teachers, others, researchers, and others education officers working in the STEM field. Each shared their expertise about different perspectives of STEM.
We express our sincere thanks to our experts, all of whom have agreed to be identified as they share their expertise, passion, and enthusiasm for all of us to be STEM educators. Our experts are listed on the last page of this Moodle book for your information.
Take a look at how they define STEM.
- Mrs Fiona Morrison, Classroom Teacher, NSW
- Mr Daniel Pride, Classroom Teacher, NSW
- Mr David Lukins, Education Officer, University of Wollongong Science Space, NSW Australia
The experts in these clips talk about STEM from an educators’ perspective. What are some ways these clips align with your own understandings? How are they different? Does anything surprise you? Are there views that are different from yours?
Take some time to reflect on this information in connection with your existing understandings.
- Dr Tiffani Apps, University of Wollongong, NSW Australia
- Professor Karen Murcia, Curtin University, WA Australia
We know educational researchers will make connections between theory and practice. And we also expect they will understand educational phenomena within a sociopolitical lens. As you listen to Dr Tiffani Apps and Professor Karen Murcia share their views on STEM, we invite you to reflect on these new views in connection with your notes so far.
- Dr Mike Karlin, California State University, Dominguez Hills, US
In this clip Dr Karlin connects definitions of STEM with the ways teachers and students might experience STEM pedagogies in the early and later years of primary/elementary school. He connects concepts of student led learning, creativity, investigations, and playful learning with the uniqueness of each classroom setting, its students and teachers.
Forum/padlet – What are other places you’ve encourage creativity, investigation, playfulness in your students? How might you use those in teaching STEM?
Is there more than just the disciplines coming together?
Fiona and David talk about the need for empathy. They argue that without empathy, there is no reason to explore and make changes because the making of those changes is about improving the ways the world works.
See what you think.
Fiona drew on the concepts of empathy and ideation when she was working with a storybook called Three by Stephen Michael King as a springboard into STEAM learning. The children spent time designing and prototyping a prosthetic leg for the main character, a dog with three legs. His name? Three!
For David, empathy is important for understanding what the community needs us to do with our STEM skills. STEM for David is about responding to a need with the focus on improving lives.
To inform this project work, members of the research team also undertook a review of research that had happened in STEM, STEAM and Makerspaces. A key finding of this research was while the STEM domains of science, technology, engineering and mathematics required focus, the “A” (the arts) was incredibly powerful in using the arts, storytelling and literacy practices to help make connections to each of the STEM domains.
So what about STEAM?
If we take the acronym STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and add The Arts, we make a new acronym STEAM. There are various views about whether STEAM is a valid approach, or whether The Arts have any place here. There are some who consider The Arts to be “creativity”, and, as such, this perspective is accounted for in the need for creativity in solving problems, designing solutions and so on.
But there are others who argue that The Arts is more than being creative. They talk about creative arts (painting, drawing, and so on), physical arts, and language arts. While we would argue that literacy is already well and truly embedded in STEM (think about the language and literacy demands of science, of technology and so on), language arts offers us an interesting and obvious way to talk about literacy in terms of the aesthetic stance. That is, stories, storytelling, drama, oral language and so on.
Our experts had some views on this.
Dr Mike Karlin shares a very personal view about the ways The Arts feature in his understanding of STEAM. Perhaps his experience links with something in your own life?
Classroom teacher Daniel shares an account of the ways he worked with his favourite novel – and Australian classic, Storm Boy by Colin Thiele. The ways he understandings STEAM, particularly the Arts has changed the ways he draws on that rich text. Take a look:
The Arts for our experts represent different things. Notice the ways the teacher practitioners connect with STEAM using existing practices, such as a read aloud, rich literature, problem solving, and empathetic approaches to understanding the world.
Reflection: What are some examples of stories, poetry, songs, artworks and so on that you know about that could help you to bring STEAM into your teaching?
Module 1 – Readings
Johnston, K., Kervin, L., & Wyeth, P. (2022). STEM, STEAM and makerspaces in early childhood: A scoping review. Sustainability, 14(20), 13533.
Mejias, S., Thompson, N., Sedas, R. M., Rosin, M., Soep, E., Peppler, K., … & Bevan, B. (2021). The trouble with STEAM and why we use it anyway. Science Education, 105(2), 209-231.
Wohlwend, K. E. (2015). Literacy playshop: New literacies, popular media, and play in the early childhood classroom. Teachers College Press.