Seeing through the acronym to the nature of STEM
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POINT AND COUNTERPOINT
Seeing through the acronym to the nature of STEM Terry Lyons 1 Published online: 18 September 2020 # Australian Curriculum Studies Association 2020
Keywords Nature of STEM . STEM education . History of STEM education . Analogies . STEM policy
Introduction The brief history of STEM is a story about the power of an acronym to catapult a loosely defined construct into the highest levels of education policy across the globe. STEM is now the acronym of choice for many Australian and international policy statements, media reports, curriculum documents, teacher conferences, and industry forecasts. Despite this, there is still widespread confusion about its definition (Akerson et al. 2018; Blackley and Howell 2015), with a recent Europe-wide review concluding that “there is no common understanding of what STEM refers to” (European Schoolnet 2018, p. 6). Hence we are in the uncomfortable situation of having an accepted and commonly used acronym, but not an agreed understanding about its definition, application, or—most importantly—its nature (Peters-Burton 2014). Throughout its trajectory, STEM has been interpreted in various ways depending on purpose and audience. In a previous paper (Lyons 2018) I suggested that its most common usages could be captured by three representations. The first is the ‘STEM shopping cart’, where STEM is used as a convenient collective term for all related disciplines, subjects or jobs. Chemistry or calculus, primary science or particle physics; it can be filled liberally with anything from the shelves in the STEM aisle. As glib as it might sound, this representation is closest to the original usage and particularly appealing to politicians and media commentators favouring a generic, allpurpose term. A second representation— the ‘STEM jigsaw’— considers the four discipline areas as inherently discrete, though with points of articulation. This is a common representation in education circles, where for example teachers may be designing interdisciplinary STEM units from * Terry Lyons [email protected] 1
Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
separate curricula which have different content and assessment expectations. A third representation— the ‘STEM palette’—refers to interpretations in which the four discipline areas are mixed seamlessly (Nadelson and Siefert 2017) to create new approaches to solving practical, real-world problems. Advocates argue that this approach reflects the skills increasingly required in contemporary STEM-related careers (e.g., Jang 2016; Sanders 2009), though others argue that this level of integration may compromise the integrity of individual discipline areas (Jacobs 2014). These representations are discussed in more detail in Lyons (2018), which concludes that while each highlights a facet of STEM, none adequately captures its intrinsic nature, which lies in the relationships between the four discipline areas. However, in this paper I look more closely at the brief history of STEM to understand how it cam
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