STEM Education: Productive Tensions Between Disciplinary and Transdisciplinary Reasoning and Practice
NARST Presidential Webinar
Presented March 2, 2023
Russell Tytler, Alfred Deakin Professor of Science Education, Deakin University, Australia
STEM Education has become widely advocated globally, spurred in part by nations’ concerns for the wealth creation implications of a STEM-literate citizenry. In Australia as elsewhere, many local models of STEM Education have developed in the absence of clear policy framings around its disciplinary/interdisciplinary character. In this webinar I drew upon a STEM Country Comparison study from 2014, and more recent research into significant Australian STEM initiatives, to explore the drivers for STEM and the tensions created between disciplinary and interdisciplinary epistemological framings, and between distinctive subject pedagogies. I argued that interdisciplinary STEM represents both a challenge and an opportunity for science education: it can be an affront to disciplinary integrity, but also an opportunity to offer productive reform opportunities for the school STEM subjects.
