STEM Coaches' Conceptions and Practices of Socioscientific Issues

• In Event: 16.060 - Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: 16.060-13 - Conceptions and Practices in Implementing Socioscientific Issues

Abstract

Interdisciplinary STEM education is argued to provide students with contextualized learning experiences that resemble real-life work in STEM-fields, along with solutions to interdisciplinary problems. A main critique of STEM education is the silence about socioscientific issues (SSIs), resulting in uninformed passive citizens. This becomes more alarming when considering the severeness of many STEM-related problems. This paper examines secondary-school coaches’ conceptions and practices of STEM education in a school-board in Ontario, Canada; particularly, focusing on available spaces for addressing SSIs and prioritizing socio-political actions. Apparently, coaches’ inter/transdisciplinary teaching/learning experiences, and their literacy about current events tended to shape their conceptions and practices of SSIs, and their willingness/resistance to teach them. We discuss the significance of our findings to activist STEM education

Authors

• Majd Zouda, University of Toronto

• Sarah Halwany, University of Toronto

• Minja Milanovic, University of Toronto

• John Lawrence Bencze, OISE/University of Toronto