Philosophy of STEM Education

A Critical Investigation

Nataly Z. Chesky, Mark R. Wolfmeyer

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137535450
• eBook ISBN: 9781137535467
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Winner of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) Critics' Choice Book Award for 2016

Philosophy of STEM Education uses philosophical methods to investigate STEM education's purpose and assumptions. It details the why (axiology), the how (epistemology) and the what (ontology) of STEM by drawing upon a variety of philosophies of education, science, mathematics, and technology.

1

Introduction to STEM Education

Abstract: We provide a brief review of STEM’s history, particularly as it relates to the philosophical mode of inquiry used in the book. The introductions here include discussions of STEM as a whole as well as some examples from among STEM subfields, such as mathematics and science education. Notably absent in this review is the use of philosophical methods, thus justifying our present inquiry. In the final section, we motivate our philosophical inquiry with a review of the little scholarship attending to it, mostly the philosophies of mathematics and science that are just beginning to be applied to education research.

Keywords: history of education; philosophy of education; STEM education

Chesky, Nataly Z. and Mark R. Wolfmeyer. Philosophy of STEM Education: A Critical Investigation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137535467.0006.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, increasing attention has been placed on public education in the United States in the fields of mathematics and science. Most recently, the emphasis has been on the education of mathematics, science, technology, and engineering, termed “STEM.” Framed as educational equality initiatives that will help students gain the knowledge they need to compete in the global marketplace, STEM may be the most indicative educational reform discourse of our time and has grown to become one of the primary foci of educational policy, in part due to its easy associations to a wide array of today’s industries: from information and communications technology to the medical field, to sustainability innovations. Given such connections, we consider STEM as the logical extension of the economic imperative for education that has gained momentum in the past 30 years.

The primary focus of this book is to shift the attention away from the strictly utilitarian aims, geared to quickly and efficiently meet the STEM initiatives, and to take a step back and ask critical questions about what types of aims the STEM initiatives are asking for, what assumptions do such aims hold, and what possible implications or consequences could such initiatives have on various socio-economic groups, funneled through a public education system that is increasingly being tied to economic, capitalistic incentives and procedures. In order to begin to answer the above questions, we will use a philosophical lens to study STEM policies as a political and social phenomenon.

In this chapter, we introduce the material of the book first by providing a brief review of STEM education’s history, particularly as it relates to the philosophical mode of inquiry used in the book. The introductions here include discussions on STEM education as a whole as well as some examples from among STEM subfields, such as mathematics and science education. Next, we review critiques of STEM education policy as they relate to our research questions above. Notably absent among this review is the use of philosophical methods, thus justifying our present inquiry. In the final section, we motivate our philosophical inquiry with a review of the little scholarship attending to it, mostly the philosophy of mathematics and science that are just beginning to be applied to education research. Finally, this chapter includes an outline of the remaining contents of this book.

1.1What is STEM?

“STEM” began as “SMET,” standing for science, mathematics, engineering, and technology. In the 1990s the National Science Foundation (NSF) coined the term in order to emphasize the importance of these four distinct disciplines (Sanders, 2009). The acronym was changed to “STEM” to help promote it, yet there are still a considerable number of Americans that associate STEM with stem cell research (ibid.). This is problematic since parents ought to be made fully aware of the kinds of reforms their children will be affected by. Even many educators are unclear about what STEM education is (Breiner et al., 2012). The National Science Foundation explains that STEM education is about proliferating the importance of these four disciplines in the education community and society at large. The acronym is ambiguous, since educators have also used it to describe the inherent interconnectedness between the four disciplines, as well as create curricula and pedagogy that link them together within one year or classroom. Below are several possible ways to understand the STEM reform initiative:

Science, mathematics, engineering, and technology are fields in which the US needs to produce more highly competent workers in order to compete in the future global marketplace.

Science, mathematics, engineering, and technology are inherently linked and therefore it would be advantageous for the learner to have real-life hands-on projects that explain and utilize the interconnectedness of them.

A high level of understanding of the fields of science, mathematics, technology, and engineering are essential knowledge sources for all future democratic citizens, and especially so for minority and underrepresented groups that may not have had access to this important area of knowledge, and this has hampered not only their ability to find a fulfilling job, but also to function as effective citizens (e.g., to get a loan, to understand the voting process, and to manage their credit and money). (Brown et al., 2011; Bybee, 2010)

Perhaps the argument can be made that the three objectives listed above are one and the same, or at the very least complement each other. These three aims are prevalent in most STEM policy reform documents; not only do these three objectives occur relatively equally in the discourse, they occur simultaneously in any given document. For instance, being a high-functioning democratic citizen may also mean having a fulfilling job. Further, generating citizens that increasingly go into technologically skilled jobs helps the nation compete in economic global market. Additionally, understanding the interconnectedness of science, mathematics, technology, and engineering may improve the teaching and learning of these traditionally difficult subjects and therefore enhance the objective of obtaining a high level of literacy in them, which in turn helps to get a job and be a good citizen.

Generally, the STEM initiatives have two main interconnecting objectives at the macro- and micro-level. At the national macro level, it is centrally important as a pillar for cementing the epistemological and pragmatic advances in technology and engineering that our country needs in order to stay economically competitive on a global level. At the microlevel, the objective is for individual students to have a strong understanding of the interdisciplinary link, objectives, and techniques that categorize STEM curricula, in order for them to become critically literate citizens and procure a financially secure employment in their adult lives (e.g., Brown et al., 2011; Bybee, 2010).

All of this is speculation since there is no way for us to clearly gauge what the motives of policymakers are and exactly how the rhetoric found in policy documents matches the varying axiological objectives of STEM education. As we will explain shortly, axiological objectives are a common starting point for philosophical inquiries into education because they point to inherent values and the general worth an educational system provides to society’s variety of constituents. What we would like to stress here is that policy discourse is inherently concerned with axiological objectives; therefore it is logical to assume that axiological objectives would be the most diverse and proliferated in the discourse surrounding STEM. Notwithstanding this tautology, policy documents are more than simply axiological objectives about the purposes of education. Axiological objectives present in policies about STEM interact with the other discourses present in policy documents, such as the epistemological claims that specify what pedagogical practices are best for teaching and learning of, say mathematics and science, and ontological assumptions that hint at how the conception of said subjects fundamentally shapes the way they are thought about and used in education. Indeed, there are several presuppositions internal to these educational objectives, such as what STEM content ought to be used for, how STEM practices and thoughts shape the modern world, and the universal quality of the internal concepts themselves, such as numbers or substances. These concepts can be placed in the philosophical category of ontology, which seeks to understand and ask questions about the basic structure of our world. The conviction underlying this book is that these presuppositions must be rigorously investigated, not only to aid in implementation and conceptualization of sound cogent policy reforms in education, but also in reflecting on the societal implications such reform efforts signify.

Thus, answering just what STEM education is proved to be a difficult task. As outlined above, STEM education communicates a concern with content areas that are interconnected and relate to present and future job conditions. Although the acronym is fairly young, it is important to question STEM education’s true age and to consider the historical trajectory in educational policy within which it emerged. Often it is argued that STEM education, or at least its seed, initiated in the 1950s with US reactions to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. In fact, the emphasis on STEM education content took place even earlier. In the 1940s engineer Vannevar Bush believed in STEM education content’s promise to solve the world’s problems. He wrote official statements to President Eisenhower calling for educational structures to prepare the nation’s future scientists, which ultimately led to the creation of the National Science Foundation (Spring, 2010). Besides the important social goals of poverty and environmental issues, also in these initial conversations was national defense, a concern given the recent conclusion of World War II. Ultimately, this concern would take on greater prominence with the launching of Sputnik and the Cold War. In 1958, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which had specific emphasis on science, mathematics, and technology education. In particular, President Eisenhower emphasized the promotion of STEM careers and the advancement of STEM teaching (ibid.), without calling it STEM, of course as the acronym had not yet been invented.

Such attention to STEM in the United States thus resulted primarily from militaristic concerns. This attention shifted in the early 1980s, as the Cold War waned and the new concerns over economic dominance by West Germany and Japan emerged. The 1983 publication A Nation at Risk points specifically to technological advancement as a key concern for US economic vitality. Since then, STEM conversation has continued to center on workforce training. As an example, Tucker (2012), president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, argues that STEM is a key component to US economic security. Although he reacts against STEM programs, he argues in favor of more competent STEM teachers for the preparation of a STEM workforce. As for what is argued as STEM’s content backbone, Wolfmeyer (2014) documents the deep commitments that mathematics education has for the development of human capital, or those intangible qualities usable by businesses.

1.2STEM education policy critiques

Not young, STEM education policy is historically entrenched with nationalistic goals of militarism and economic security. Within the current context of neoliberal governmentality and multinational corporations, these commitments have made broader turns towards global economic and power elite. Having laid out these commitments and the historical trajectory of STEM, we next review the ways to critique educational policy so as to turn these lenses on STEM education policy.

Education policy critiques encompass large interrelated areas. Many critiques center on exploring the efficiency of the specific policies; others concentrate on uncovering the fallible foundational principles that are used to justify policy decisions. Still others question the covert agendas behind policies, which either intentionally or unintentionally negatively affect minority groups. Most STEM policy critiques to date focus only on the first of these; it is our intention to push the conversation beyond a policy’s efficiency in the direction of its foundational principles and covert agendas. Here we will review the efforts made thus far as motivation for our work’s complementary place in STEM conversations.

Most critiques on policies’ effectiveness question whether the policies, as they are stated, can reach their purported goals. For example, some scholars have argued that there have only been cosmetic changes in mathematics education with no real changes taking place. Reys (2001) asserts that the reason for lack of change in reforms is the difficulty in changing textbooks, which are still the primary teaching tool in schools. Districts that are undergoing financial stress do not have the funds necessary for getting new resources to complement the guidelines certain policies specify. Without the funding, policies become purely rhetorical and have little or no effect on the real day-to-day lives of teachers and students in the classroom (Apple, 2003). Schoenfeld (2004) claims that the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and NSF policy standards recommendations have been vague and backed by little or no evidence or research. This is an example of critiques on efficiency that are quite widespread on all ends of the educational debate. The commonality between these critiques of educational policy is that they all expose the problems with the way policies specify how changes will take place.

Speaking more directly to the entirety of STEM, a group of STEM education experts wrote a policy white paper for the National Academy of Education (Kilpatrick, Quinn, and National Academy of Education, 2009). The arguments are similar to those made in the specifics of mathematics education: the enacted national, state and local policies lack the substance for significant change. For example, while paying science and mathematics teachers higher salaries is something that might work, these scholars argue that such changes pale in comparison to complete overhauls of standards at the national level. The build-up of such argumentation by academics has aligned with other political and economic interests (e.g., assessment industry) to usher in national standards for both mathematics and science (Wolfmeyer, 2014). Again, these policy critiques center primarily on the efficacy of policy to address the economic and militaristic imperatives in STEM. Little thus far has critiqued STEM policy on its fundamental terms.

Foundational views could encompass cultural, social, political, and philosophical perspectives. Stigler and Hiebert (2004) express the idea that “implementation cannot be successful unless it is accompanied by ideological and cultural change within schools” (p. 15). What these authors are addressing is the way in which STEM education is related to our cultural perceptions about the uses and values this content has in our society. Take mathematics, for example. If educators and policymakers believe mathematics is a necessary tool for economic prosperity for individual and national gains, they will emphasize the utilitarian aspects of the subject and may ignore the beauty of mathematical proofs and procedures, not to mention the creative and imaginative disposition needed to enjoy and be good at mathematics. Further, if educators and policy makers have not experienced the joy a mathematician feels when attempting to solve a problem, they may not emphasize this kind of aesthetic experience when doing mathematics. Hence, educators and policymakers that either do not appreciate the wonder of mathematics or see it as a means to an economic ends, will interpret and implement policies to reform mathematics education in perhaps different ways than originally intended by the theorists and researchers that have helped shape such reforms.

Therefore, our work here complements other STEM policy analysis by moving beyond arguments related to efficient policy initiatives. We are developing robust analysis that reflect back to fundamental assumptions and presuppositions in the policy that, in turn, moves STEM forward as a hopeful space in which teachers can fully engage. It is worth noting that our work’s attention to philosophical methods is entirely within the spirit of developing an informed practice of education.

1.3Why philosophy of STEM?

This section provides a rationale for why philosophical inquiry can help in understanding educational phenomenon. As we began to suggest in the previous section, this work complements the policy critique work that focuses on policy efficacy. Philosophical method is the application of philosophical concepts to a particular domain of study. It includes the formulation of questions and problems and justifiable solutions to these. It does not occur by collecting and analyzing data on the lived experience, as is the case with a variety of forms of empirical research.

While a great deal has been written about how to meet the objectives of STEM, the work has been limited in methodology, strictly adhering to quantitative analysis, and limited in scope, rarely putting into question the overarching objectives of the policies themselves. Scholars in various fields have critiqued such work. Educational researchers have offered qualitative or more nuanced approaches to better understand the subtleties of STEM initiative implementation (e.g., Lester, 2005; Schmidt, Wang, and McKnight, 2005; Stigler and Hiebert, 2004; Stone, 2002). Social justice scholars critique the STEM initiatives as not targeting embedded social equity issues rhetorically advocated for in the discourse itself (e.g., Apple, 1992; Gabbard, 2000; Martin, 2003; Wolfmeyer, 2014). However, very little has been written targeting the philosophical assumptions inherent in the STEM policies themselves, for example, as they might lend themselves to social injustices. We believe this is a grave mistake since mathematics and science, the foundational knowledge needed in technology and engineering, are both fields deeply entrenched in historical, cultural, and philosophical perspectives. Put another way, those with critical perspectives on education would do well to deeply explore STEM policy, as we hope to here. If we hope to counter balance the neoliberal rhetoric that has so permeated educational policy discourses in the United States, perhaps the best place to start is where the rhetoric i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction to STEM Education
• 2  STEMs What, Why, and How? Ontology, Axiology, and Epistemology
• 3  Critical Inquiry into STEM Education
• 4  Critical Opportunities in STEM Education
• 5  Concluding Thoughts
• References
• Index