1 Importance of STEM for social, economic and environmental futures
Introduction
This book takes a deliberate future focus on learning in STEM because our future depends on the advances we can make in preparing future graduates. It provides a rationale (Chapter 1) for integration, based on the importance of social, economic and environmental imperatives. The shift from more traditional ways of thinking about learning in separate disciplines is necessary to support social development (through emphasising transferable skills) and economic development (through innovation and the creation of new business opportunities) and for addressing the ecological imperatives related to environmental impact and sustainability much more directly.
The discussions throughout the book take into account the trends influencing the availability and transfer of information, which has an impact on the roles of educators and learners. There are consequences of these shifts for pedagogical changes and the need to rethink what higher education institutions (HEIs) offer within coursework for adding value to students in terms of learning gains. These include:
- Appropriating STEM knowledge, technical and practical skills and transferable capabilities towards career orientations.
- Including work-integrated learning (WIL).
- Providing access to the internet, mobile technologies (anytime, anywhere learning with almost unlimited access to information) and a wide range of new immersive technologies (AR, VR, XR).
- Allowing for the impact of ubiquitous computing and differential digital literacy among learners and for emerging domains, such as data science, as fields in themselves.
- Making learning globalised (cloud sharing) and networked, including the availability of open education resources, yet valuing local expertise for co-creating new solutions (knowledge, products and processes).
- Changing to assessment practices that move away from normative testing to problem- and project-based activities for assessing how students combine knowledge, skills and capabilities simultaneously.
- Considering the importance of cultural competencies embedded within cyber citizenship.
- Considering the importance of reflective feedback loops to learning, teaching and organisational development.
Chapter 2 emphasises the important role technologies play in advancing STEM knowledge and understanding in practice. There are specific disciplines or sub-fields that contribute to the design, innovation and evaluation of products, processes and systems. In addition, with increased digitalisation, there has been a burgeoning of technological “tools” that can be used to solve problems through managing large data streams and undertaking simultaneous analysis, controlling things remotely and solving problems through simulations and tools that help to create new solutions to a wide range of environmental issues. Specific examples are given for how relatively new technologies such as virtual reality, gaming, augmented reality, extreme reality and artificial intelligence can be used to provide multi-channel learning experiences that advance knowledge and skills and help to solve problems.
Technologies are also enabling greater access to information and therefore access to education more generally (UN Sustainable Development Goal 4). Communication technologies help to transfer information more quickly so that new knowledge and processes can be shared, compared and revised through crowd sourcing and co-curation.
Throughout the book, there is reference to relevant research, as well as the inclusion of specific examples of where integration is occurring at course, programme and university levels. This has led to the development of a framework of components that are useful to consider in the development of integrated approaches, as shown in Chapter 3. The components of the framework have implications for how to design activities and courses using appropriate technological tools and pedagogies (actions by educators). Chapter 4 provides advice for how to design integrated STEM activities. It considers the appropriateness of a range of teaching and learning approaches relative to the intentions for student learning outcomes, and deliberately focusses on activities that foster the integration of knowledge from several disciplines, the development of skills and the inclusion of transferable skills, concurrently.
Assessment of integrated STEM is discussed in Chapter 5, as assessment tends to drive what is emphasised and hence what students put effort into and what educators promote. The process of designing assessments for integrated approaches is provided along with examples of generic and hybrid assessment rubrics that can be adapted and applied to a range of learning contexts and issues. These provide illustrations of how integrated knowledge can be assessed as well as capabilities (transferable skills) within the same activity.
Importantly, the challenges for implementation are discussed in Chapter 6, including how educators can design and assess integrated STEM, the potential shifts in roles that might be needed for educators and students and a range of types of professional learning and reflective practices for supporting the redesign of activities, courses and assessment. While predetermined content delivery previously dominated, it is time to reconsider what knowledge is useful, how it is acquired and what skills students need (practical, technical and transferable) as we apply more recent findings from learning sciences about how students learn effectively.
Preparing appropriate experiences for future social good is a rather daunting task for educators, given the array of pressures they are under due to institutional financial constraints and consequential increases in teaching workloads and expectations for performance in research. However, building social capital through human skill development should be a core focus for HEIs. As a consequence of graduates gaining transferable skills that contribute to joined-up thinking (creative and critical thinking as well as skills in innovation design), they are more likely to have generative mindsets for contributing to social and economic entrepreneurship. People with these skills are needed to build social capital and to generate new opportunities for businesses to grow.
There are also the dual pressures of meeting the world’s demand for higher education provision, yet doing so in a very competitive environment that demands novel qualifications and graduates who are job-ready. As the availability of free online resources and courses increases, students can access information from anywhere around the world without leaving home – at any time and in ways that accommodate other aspects of their lives, such as work and family commitments. They can choose whether they want qualifications as part of this access or not. Higher education in this context is no longer primarily targeted at school leavers, but can and does include further career opportunities for mature students. Students’ primary motivation to enrol may be to reskill for future employment. This means HEIs must address the needs of future workplaces, including specific and technical skills, as well as transferable skills such as collaboration, communication and creative and critical thinking.
For this reason, the final chapter synthesises the trends that HEIs are taking into account as they redesign qualifications. There are already multiple massification and boutique opportunities in existence. To enable more widespread, system-wide shifts in higher education, there will need to be substantial changes in thinking about the importance of integrated STEM, professional learning for activity, course and assessment design and collaboration among educators.
The final chapter also promotes the need for integrating STEM to address local and global issues. The effects of not attending to carbon emissions are evident all over the planet. Addressing local and global sustainability of resource use must be high on the agenda of every government and therefore drive curriculum changes for addressing the high need for problem-solvers. All governments will need multiple solutions to change the way the Earth’s resources are used (or not) and reused. This can be aligned with the concept that HEIs could shift more, to be places of co-creation of knowledge with students through learning experiences within coursework. New knowledge has traditionally been generated through research, with the findings from research used as examples or applications within learning contexts. While this will still be true in the future, increasingly HEIs are providing opportunities for students to learn and contribute to new knowledge through co-generating new ideas, co-creating curriculum aligned with their interests, questioning current knowledge, using inquiry and problem-solving approaches to seek novel solutions to local or world problems and creating new knowledge and understanding by connecting seemingly disparate ideas. We need much more research to inform future offerings in STEM through systematic evaluation of what works and why.
Why is STEM so important?
There is a worldwide focus on STEM education – science, technology, engineering, mathematics and, sometimes, medicine (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, 2018) – because of the intrinsic value of combining disciplinary knowledge and skills with advances in new knowledge, products and processes (Corrigan, 2020). Associated with this combination is a worldwide trend considering how disciplines can be taught in schools and in higher education by integrating across and within these disciplines, leading to interconnected knowledge, skills and capabilities that are needed in combination for creating innovative solutions to social, economic and environmental issues, locally and globally. In typical fashion, clustering of disciplines has spawned acronyms: STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics, while STEAM – science, technology, engineering, arts (and humanities) and mathematics – is also gaining popularity. This book is focussed on STEM, as this is emphasised in the compulsory sector and is beginning to be adopted in HEIs.
The intention of this book is to examine available evidence and provide examples of how integration of curriculum in STEM can be implemented. Research findings are used to answer whether integration in STEM leads to improved educational, social and career outcomes for graduates. There is promise of positive outcomes; for example, there has been a move in the compulsory sector to develop a STEM strategy in Australia (Education Council, 2015) and in the USA (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, 2018) as well as in many other countries.
However, in order to answer large-scale questions about improved outcomes, we must start with some specific ones:
- How do we know an integrated STEM approach in higher education will prepare students for future work, life and citizenship?
- How can STEM assist in solving significant problems or developing innovations in future workplaces?
- Under what circumstances is an integrated approach useful?
- What specific examples help to design curriculum in higher education?
- What would be included in a framework for supporting the development of integrated STEM curricula?
- Are there promising pedagogies and assessment methods that could be transferred to multiple learning contexts?
- What are the challenges for implementing STEM in higher education?
These questions will be addressed throughout this book.
A neoliberal rationalisation for emphasising STEM is that it can lead to new knowledge and provide new industries for countries to gain a competitive edge (Yanez et al., 2019). More importantly, there has been a call to address urgent ecological, ethical, technological and social justice concerns prevalent in the world through STEM education (Zeidler, 2016). HEIs have an important role in addressing the great need for social and economic development and to solve people–planet imperatives within an increasingly globalised world, where action within local communities is very important for sustainable futures (Robertson, 2017; Yanez et al., 2019). HEIs are trying to accommodate locality and specific issues and problems of communities, through partnerships with industries who provide students with work-integrated learning opportunities to solve local problems. This enables industry experts to work with and advise students as they collaborate on projects.
Higher education is on the brink of a revolution, one begun relatively recently in response to changes in digitisation and rethinking qualifications more aligned to STEM-related graduate employment. This technological revolution was been termed the “fourth industrial revolution” (Schwab, 2016) and will require workers to think about the interrelatedness of ideas, complexity and multiple layers of understanding and solving problems. Consequently, there is increasing reliance on technological skills and the ability to connect ideas, data and other forms of knowledge.
Skills of acquiring, using and integrating different knowledge sets and skills are vital to this advancement. Integrating knowledge from different disciplines and domains within disciplines is considered desirable for developing solutions to unknown problems and new innovations (Schwab, 2016). Change is often driven by social and economic priorities and new possibilities: take, for example, changes and disruptions derived from the possibilities afforded by electronic hyper-connectedness (Uber and Airbnb) and the effects on more traditional business models, without considering ethics and moral obligations to workers, or any associated legal frameworks. Therefore, there is an urgent need to adapt curricula in higher education to accommodate how technological changes can support future innovation and ethical sociocultural outcomes simultaneously (Yanez et al., 2019; Zeidler, 2016).
As publicly funded organisations and providers of the future workforce, the various types of higher education (such as community colleges, liberal arts colleges, research universities, conservatories, technical colleges and many other categories) are taking notice of comments by the World Economic Forum (2017) that STEM skills will be inherent in approximately 75% of jobs in the future. In response, HEIs are infusing communication, collaboration and critical and creative thinking into STEM discipline offerings and, in some cases, even combining disciplines. While such skills are not unique to STEM disciplines, they are integral to STEM for developing new innovations and solutions to global issues. For example, global issues that have multiple solutions include poverty, sufficient nutritious food, global warming, disease eradication, housing solutions, automated processing and automated vehicles in relation to job decreases, the use of quantum supercomputers, the increase of robotics and the flow on effects for the need for human skills, genetic edits and neurote...
