Disciplinary Boundary Crossing: Permeability and Affordances in STEM Education

• In Event: 54.076 - Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives on STEM Education: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

Purposes
If STEM is to be useful as a construct, it should do useful explanatory work. This presentation synthesizes research from a variety of sources for the purpose of addressing the questions:
• What is it that STEM explains?
• What is it that STEM brings together?
• What might bring STEM together?
In particular, the presentation explores the permeability of the boundaries that define and segregate the individual STEM disciplines.

Perspective
The disciplines encompassed by STEM are currently distinguished by associated bodies of practice. Analogous distinctions apply in STEM education, extending to the signature pedagogies that characterize each discipline. Current curricular design reflects restrictive conceptions of field-specificity and the unique integrity of bodies of knowledge encrypted as school subjects. Attention must be paid to the affordances of affiliation and the legitimacy of STEM disciplines as connected bodies of knowledge and communities of practice offering enhanced educational opportunities through their interconnection. One consequence could be the reconceptualization of the organizing principles of the curriculum.

Methods and data sources
An extensive review of curriculum and policy documents, and research literature on student enrolments, graduation demographics, and career trajectories problematizes the simplistic advocacy of increased recruitment of students into the STEM disciplines (e.g., Cyranoski, Gilbert, Ledford, Nayar & Yahia, 2011).
In the schooling system, there is growing interest in translating STEM as a gathering term for trans-disciplinary pedagogies focusing on inquiry and problem solving as a means to better engage students in these subjects.
The approach pursued in this presentation is to review documents related to curriculum, policy and the needs of industry and society and to identify those constructs central to the needs of contemporary society to which the boundary walls of the STEM disciplines seem most permeable and which might therefore serve as vehicles for a reconceptualization of the STEM disciplines and their realization within the curriculum.

Conclusions
If STEM, as a unitary aggregate or assemblage of component domains, is to be of value in educational (or other) settings, then we need a mechanism to enable boundary crossing between the STEM disciplines (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011).
The current demands of industry contest the disciplinary silos on which the curriculum has been based in favor of adaptable interpersonal and inquiry-based skills (Collet & Hine, 2013; Engeström et al., 1995). Such a curriculum would need to be structured around constructs to which the boundaries of the STEM disciplines were permeable. Contenders for such constructs are: Discourse, Artefacts, Reasoning and Evidence. The presentation will elaborate on the societal value and viability of each of these as boundary objects between the STEM disciplines.

Scholarly significance
STEM Education as a field of endeavor offers opportunities to explore constructs that transcend discipline-specificity, while meeting the contemporary needs of industry and society. STEM curricula should reflect the transient and evolving character of the factual knowledge of STEM and provide a strong focus on the practice of STEM. This may prove achievable through a reorganization of the curriculum around those constructs to which the boundaries between STEM disciplines are most permeable.

Author

• David J. Clarke, University of Melbourne