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

[Stephen Zander]

Leon,
You have given the STEM issue a lot of considered thought. I agree with many of the points you have included in your posting. I will give it some thought when I have finished my marking left over from last term and have completed a little more preparation for my term four classes.

Kind regards
Dr Stephen Zander

Sent from my iPad


On 4 Oct 2017, at 09:58, Leon Harris <leon at quoll.com<mailto:leon at quoll.com>> wrote:

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?




_______________________________________________
Catalist mailing list
Catalist at lists.stawa.net<mailto:Catalist at lists.stawa.net>
http://lists.stawa.net/mailman/listinfo/catalist_lists.stawa.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.stawa.net/pipermail/catalist_lists.stawa.net/attachments/20171004/f3abcbdc/attachment.html>