[Catalist] STEM - no philosophy, no definition, but a set of opportunities nonetheless

[Leon Harris]

Greetings to all.

I am interested in some public debate on this STEM movement that our 
schools are being encouraged to adopt. I am posting this in the hope 
that it will stimulate such debate.

In this little missive, I will outline what I see as some of the 
problems with the current approach, highlight some of the opportunities 
and suggest some possible ways forward.

Problem 1: it is a case of the blind leading the blind

It seems to me that STEM in WA is not underpinned by any coherent 
educational philosophy, nor even any precise definition. At a recent 
conference held at Curtin, I would have spoken to at least 20 people who 
had no consistent definition of what STEM was, or what it might even 
look like in schools. How is it even possible to frame a coherent and 
effective response to this thing, that which our political lords and 
masters have asked of us, if we have no precise definition.

Problem 2: STEM appears to be politically rather than educationally driven

It is, of course, quite possible that the whole STEM movement (as 
distinct from the individual disciplines that make up Science, 
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) is just a political construct. 
A cynical observer might notice that STEM received its current great 
push in the USA in 2009 just after the GFC collapse, and in Australia in 
2015 when the mining boom started to look sick. From this, one might 
conclude that once again, pointing to that old ladder of success that 
science is, was a very deft bit of smoke and mirrors designed to cover 
an option-bereft government’s behind.

Problem 3: There is negligible new funding of the educational sector to 
achieve it

Certainly in WA, we have not seen any new investment in bringing it 
about. That $1M per year STEM consortium essentially cannibalised the 
funding from an earlier successful science enrichment program SPICE – no 
new cash was added to the sector.

Problem 4: There is no STEM-specific pedagogy, or philosophy, and 
particularly no deep intellectual analysis of the phenomenon

The University participants at the STEM conference were strangely 
lacking in any sort of intellectual depth or rigor on this subject. 
Sure, the usual platitudes about the importance of Science, Technology, 
Engineering and Mathematics to WA economy were trotted out. Those old 
“we are educating our children for future jobs that haven’t been 
invented yet” memes seem to have come back into vogue, having not been a 
feature since 2010 or thereabouts. Actually, the whole shebang reminded 
me of a peacock spider waving its’ brightly coloured behind at its 
potentially lethal mate – us, the classroom teachers being that mate! 
Dazzling display, where is the content? There was no framework to hang 
this on – no definitions of the problem, no useful bits of philosophy to 
help us the poor sods at the coalface pick what is worthwhile. In short, 
the university people were decidedly lacking in any sort of intellectual 
leadership. Do they think that STEM is just a passing fad?

It was quite interesting also to see how light on for analytics the 
speakers collectively were. Our current students were decried for 
avoiding the hard subjects and gaming the ATAR by people from the very 
institutions that set the rules that govern the ATAR game. In other 
words, if you are a university academic, look to your institutions lack 
of requirement for higher maths prerequisites for entry rather than to 
the kid who wants to achieve the goal of a vocation that your 
institution controls access to! However, these were treated as student 
(human) failings rather than the systems failing that they were. This 
suggests to me that they are unlikely to be fixed soon.

Many of the interesting social phenomena that we see that seem to 
indicate the need for STEM subjects have not been examined – no one is 
asking why. Why is China rising industrially and scientifically? Why 
does their technology out compete ours? Why do our students decline in 
ability in mathematics and science over the last 20 years? Why do fewer 
of our students choose science subjects? (hint: look at the marketplace, 
and the ROI for different degrees). What criteria should we use to 
choose whether to adopt or reject a particular technology? Nobody was 
thinking clearly about this!

Problem 5. No-one seems to know how to teach this.

Another interesting thing to observe was the emphasis on 
interdisciplinary approaches. At least 2 of the keynote speakers decried 
the silo approach to teaching. Employers like that, silo bad, 
multidisciplinary good. Ugg ! So simple, only an old Neanderthal like me 
wouldn’t get it. Except that on all of the multidisciplinary teams that 
I have worked on in academic research and industrial contexts, the thing 
that is valued is deep technical expertise, held by a number of 
participants, brought together and working in a collaborative team. You 
don’t get your tea lady to do your microbiology test for you, and you 
don’t get your molecular biologists to commission and calibrate your 
Mossbauer spectrometer. However in the ideal team, the physicist 
commissions the spectrometer, the tea lady keeps the microbiologist off 
the food utensils (at least until they have been cleaned up from the 
lab), and the microbiologist types and tends to the cultures. 
Interdisciplinary collaboration isn’t dumbing down. So what is wrong 
with developing deep expertise and then, once people can, bringing it 
across the disciplines? That is what we do now! Be very wary that STEM 
doesn’t lead to dumbing down of subjects, contrary to popular opinion, 
there is a heck of a lot that you can’t just Google, and in science, 
whose knowledge base growth has been more exponential than many other 
subjects, we actually need more time not less for content and its 
application.

Unless there are huge and radical shifts to timetabling and DOTT 
structures, there is little way an in-school collaborations between 
different disciplines can happen on any systemic basis on anything other 
than trivial projects. I have set up and been involved in such 
collaborations. The only way we could do it is voluntarily in our own 
time, and I would be hesitant to do it again without 0.2 worth of time 
to hand out among the 3 participants – it was a lot of work. I don’t 
know about you guys, but I put in around 60-ish h a week, peaking at 80 
in reporting weeks. I don’t have time to do 5 subjects and pick up STEM, 
unless it is in a superficial manner.

At this point, I’d like to turn my attention to some of the 
opportunities that STEM affords.

Opportunity 1: STEM provides the possibility of innovating and 
refreshing old curricula. Most of our science practicals were a thing 
since the time of the Unit Curriculum in the 1970s. (I note that a few 
from the STEM consortium projects date from that time too – maybe there 
is nothing new under the sun!) Perhaps STEM is an opportunity to 
modernise. Certainly in my past my students have enjoyed measuring 
“little g” by programming an Arduino to flash 100 times per second, and 
then filming it fall past a ruler with an iphone. There is science 
technology, engineering and mathematics in that! At a past school, my 
students enjoyed my rehash of the energy efficient house assignment, by 
taking the Arduino-based thermal imaging camera I built for them, and 
modifying it to get an image of heat loss from their house. Certainly 
STEM can enrich projects! The project that my extension students won the 
2015 STS with, namely designing and building a device to short circuit a 
zinc/air hearing aid battery and then measure the curve of time versus 
terminal voltage to make it into an oxygen concentration sensor was an 
excellent example of a mix of engineering, science, mathematics, 
technology and research. If we can tap the innovation, and avoid the 1-2 
lockstep dumb down, then the focus on STEM could be positive.

Opportunity 2. If properly resourced, STEM offers the possibility of 
interdisciplinary collaboration, but probably only after hours unless 
one or more teachers has extra DOTT/TOIL. You can’t be in 2 places at 
once, and collaboration outside your field increases the teaching work, 
not decreases it. If schools administrations get this, and maybe give 
time off in lieu, then perhaps after school curricula may work. 
In-school collaborations seem problematic for 3 or 4 teachers to work 
together at y9 or y10 level, largely due to lack of collaboration and 
planning time.

Opportunity 3. Extra attention for science particularly, and other 
disciplines involved as well can be a good thing! In the STEM conference 
at Curtin, I noticed a lot of presentations which took current 
approaches and branded them as STEM. In other words, good quality 
teaching, led from the classroom, could be rallied under the STEM banner 
and recognised/rewarded as such. It seemed that many good teachers are 
doing what teachers always do by pinning the bits of the curriculum onto 
current events and contexts in the outside society. We can use the focus 
on STEM to reward and acknowledge them.

After examining some of the problems and opportunities, I would like to 
look at some possible ways forward.

Possibility 1.We need to re-engineer interdisciplinary interaction for 
teachers. We don’t get it in the staff room – we are just too busy. It 
is the nature of people to be territorial, and different departments 
always have their own territories that aren’t always inviting to others. 
We need a structure that brings people together, and we need to design 
that structure so that it works with human nature rather than against 
it. The Coderdojo model looks good, and could be expanded to other 
contexts. The aspects of this model that make it work is that it has 
assigned roles that allow different people to come together. It makes a 
place at the table for everyone. If you expanded the “champion” role to 
a math champion, a science champion, a technology champion, and an 
engineering champion, then you have a place for all areas. If run after 
school, but with time off in lieu, you could have a very successful model.

I am thinking of a solar car challenge that could be configured this 
way, run for example on a Wednesday in Term 1 and then entered into the 
Solar Car Challenge that STAWA run.

Possibility 2. We run STEM within our current framework, just as a 
“recognition of worth”thing for each of the disciplines. So the maths 
department occasionally acknowledges a science context, the science 
department occasionally uses a data logger in one of their experiments, 
and technology let their kids build a model for a science or math 
contest or competition. Each discipline focusses on building skills and 
depth in its own area, and offers friendly but passing support to its 
fellow STEM disciplines. In other words, the same old show.

Possibility 3: Some schools differentiate into STEM specific schools and 
run tightly integrated timelines, largely abandoning the formal 
curriculum with project-based learning as a central pedagogy. In this 
model, choice is the important thing. At this conference, we were shown 
an exemplar in the states where staff who didn’t agree had the choice to 
leave to other schools, and students who couldn’t cope in that 
environment (aka had special needs that weren’t compatible with that 
style of learning) were sent/encouraged/given the choice to go elsewhere.

Possibility 4: We fund the subject associations to run contests, 
competitions and prizes, and treat STEM integration from outside of the 
school. In other words, make it a project-based learning, that schools 
can configure their staff to run optionally. If those associations were 
to study the Coderdojo model, and explicitly make space for teachers of 
each discipline when setting up the framework, that could work.

So is STEM more than a passing fad? Maybe in its’ current form, but the 
underlying disciplines upon which it built are not.

Is it something that a whole load of people can rebadge their hobby 
horse as, and continue along as before? To some extent we see this with 
the universities, all the project-based learning people, with the D&T 
departments and their new laser cutters that can make the most amazing 
things as they stink out the corridors with their fumes.

In my opinion, and I recognise that it is contentious, there are a whole 
load of non-teaching camp followers hitching a lift on the STEM 
movement. I think it is also important for those in the class to have a 
say.

What do you want from STEM? How would you like it to play out in your 
classroom?


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