Tuesday 9 August 2016

There has been an unprecedented push to revitalise interest in STEM education. Much of the discussion of the ’T’ in STEM education has been whether coding should be a central element of school education. This talk investigates the arguments for and against ‘coding in the curriculum.’ No sensible person thinks that teaching coding in the classroom will produce master programmers’, any more than teaching music in the school curriculum will produce master musicians. However the teaching of music can encourage some students to become musicians and the same would be true for coding. The issue is more what concepts are addressed in teaching coding, and how essential they are for engendering an understanding of the digital world around us, and improving productivity and innovation for which ICT skills and capability are essential.

With the increased national and international focus on advancing STEM education, it is important to ensure all of its disciplines are represented in the curriculum. To-date, the STEM acronym has been used largely in reference to science, with less emphasis on the remaining disciplines – especially engineering. Yet engineering design, a core component of engineering education, is now seen internationally as a foundational process linking the STEM disciplines, not just confined to engineering. Engineering concepts, design processes, representing, modelling, and innovative design-based problem-solving are all featured within the new Design and Technologies Curriculum. This paper will explore the nature and roles of these engineering components and discuss ways in which they might be integrated within primary school students’ STEM learning. The paper will include findings from STEM-based problem-solving research with a focus on engineering learning.

Well-recognised as a powerful driver of national economic growth, STEM lies at the heart of calls worldwide for educational reform. In Australia, Chief Scientists are calling for STEM education to better engage students on STEM-related career pathways. In the USA, STEM educators are being urged to produce graduates with creative and innovative abilities required of an increasingly high-tech workforce. However, an equally important challenge for STEM education is to prepare young people with general capabilities for active participation in community and professional forums for addressing ethical issues associated with the global impact of science and technology. Education for sustainable development remains a pressing priority. Thus, STEM educators are being challenged to design curricula and pedagogies to develop students' disciplinary knowledge and skills as well as their abilities as critical consumers, creative and ethically astute citizens, innovative designers, good communicators and collaborative decision-makers. There is an international wellspring of educators endeavouring to meet this challenge by combining STEM and the Arts to produce a multi-literate citizenry and workforce for the 21st Century. In this presentation I will outline how two secondary schools in Western Australia are developing interdisciplinary STEAM curricula.

Over the last three years, the Scientist in Residence program (a collaboration between the Department of Education and Child Development, and Flinders University) investigated a model of professional learning in science education that capitalised upon teachers’ moral purpose and drove their creativity. Insight into how teachers transformed their science classrooms is provided through examples of activities, work samples and clips of teachers describing how they changed their practice and how that, in turn, changed the engagement and achievement of the children. These resources will serve to illustrate some of the principles of practice that the teachers drew upon. In particular, starting with the Science as a Human Endeavour strand of the curriculum and letting the Science Understandings serve this purpose. Data about the shift in teachers’ perceptions and practice speaks to the characteristics of the professional learning – making time and space for teachers to achieve a closer match between their classroom practice and their professional identity.