The Presidential Webinar series is part of the Virtual Events initiative to engage the NARST and science education community in productive, stimulating, and forward-thinking virtual events throughout the year. This webinar series offers scholars opportunities to participate in critical discussion about research, vision, and action around a central topic.

Webinar 3: March 3, 2023

STEM Education: Productive Tensions Between Disciplinary and Transdisciplinary Reasoning and Practice

Speaker: 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.

View webinar video on YouTube

Webinar 2: January 28, 2022

Imagining more inclusive and just futures in science education research, policy, and practice

We pre-recorded four 30-minute discussions with each Panelist around their work.  Viewers were asked to watch these discussions before the Synchronous Webinar on January 28th, and to submit questions for the panelists to address during the webinar. 

View Webinar Video on YouTube

View pre-Webinar Videos 

This virtual event was free and open to all scholars. 

Panelists:

• Dr. Mildred Boveda, Pennsylvania State University
• Dr. Srikala Naraian, Teachers College, Columbia University
• Dr. Emily Nusbaum, Mills College & University of San Diego
• Dr. Paulo Tan, Johns Hopkins University

Organizer and Discussant: Dr. Phillip Boda, University of Illinois at Chicago

This webinar is the second in the newly initiated Presidential webinar series. The series is based on my NARST Presidential theme: Unity and Inclusion for Global Scientific Literacy: Invite as a community. Unite as a community. For this installment, I invited critical scholar Dr. Phillip Boda (University of Illinois at Chicago) to coordinate the webinar and continue our conversation about “inclusion” as pertains to science and science education.

Science education research has problematized who has historically been able to participate in the scientific enterprise, who may recognize themselves as scientists, and who can pursue science degrees. Pushing on work exploring science identity, access to general education curriculum, and legally-mandated accommodations, this Presidential webinar brings together a critical panel to discuss what inclusion could mean from outside the field. This panel will also imagine more inclusive and just futures in science education research, policy, and practice by positioning difference as a site of possibility. Attendees will be exposed to theories and methodologies that can be applied to more justice-oriented research and toward the development of more transdisciplinary collaborations.

Inaugural Webinar: October 6, 2021

Disrupting the image of who can be a scientist: What does inclusion look like?  What should inclusion look like?

View Webinar Video 

Speakers:

• Terrell Morton, Assistant Professor, University of Missouri, US
• Emily MacLeod, PhD student, UCL Institute of Education, London, England
• Scott Cohen, PhD student, Georgia State University, US
• Katerina Pia Günter, PhD student, Uppsala University, Sweden
• Discussant: Dr. Lucy Avraamidou, University of Gronigen, Netherlands

This session highlights the critical work of four early career scholars who engage in research toward science identity development that promotes inclusivity, equity, and representation within the community of science. Our aim is to push the conversation towards disrupting the image of who can be a scientist by asking: Who is invited? Who does the inviting? What does inclusion look like? What should inclusion look like? Who decides? How can our scholarship disrupt the community toward inclusivity and promote science identity development? Essential questions were critically examined and discussed.