AMERiCA LEARNiNG MEDiA

K-12 and higher education models that support STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), must focus on innovating content, accessibility, and delivery platforms to address the needs of today’s students and better understand how pedagogy and technology must interconnect to satisfy the needs of a dramatic evolution in how learning is happening.

by Dulce García, President - Ibero American Science and Technology Education Consortium (ISTEC)

Innovation used to be the buzz word in the STEM disciplines themselves, and must now be adopted by the growing field of STEM education as a pedagogical paradigm.

Organizations dedicated to advancing the state of higher education in STEM education have a set of fairly complex challenges ahead of them. This complexity results from the need to move toward more interdisciplinary and global platforms in STEM education initiatives, along with the challenges of keeping pace with technology and the rapidly evolving learning styles of our youth.

We must also ensure that capacity building in education is taking place earlier in a student’s life, before they actually enroll in college. Attracting more students toward STEM fields is critical for both the domestic and global competitiveness of societies, but we must reach those students earlier in the K-12 environment, and we must also reform curricula and the delivery platforms of education to motivate the new generation of learners.

I like to use as a reference the National Academy of Engineering’s view on the grand engineering challenges for the 21st Century, as a conceptual framework for the evolution of STEM education:  “In each of these broad realms of human concern — sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy of living — specific grand challenges await engineering solutions. The world’s cadre of engineers will seek ways to put knowledge into practice to meet these grand challenges. Applying the rules of reason, the findings of science, the aesthetics of art, and the spark of creative imagination, engineers will continue the tradition of forging a better future” (www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/9=8996/9221.aspx).

It is a challenge to keep pace with the rapidly decreasing technology innovation cycles in order to provide society the tools needed for security, healthcare, energy, water, and overall environmental sustainability. It is yet another challenge to ensure that quality of life standards are improved for an ever increasing world population that would otherwise remain marginalized in their basic societal needs. This reality requires that we drive STEM education toward more inclusive platforms that integrate: (1) inter-disciplinarity; (2) global mindset; (3) environmental awareness; (4) K-12 outreach; and (4) the active use of technology in education and professional development of educators to breach the generational gap between younger students and an older generation of educators, or what Marc Prensky calls the breach between digital natives and digital immigrants.

According to Prensky (2001), “our students have changed radically.Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach”.

Digital natives think and process information differently, and innovation in curricula must go beyond situating a course in a distance learning platform to a paradigm shift in the creation and transfer of knowledge itself.

In other words, we must think about this in strategic rather than tactical terms, and will require that colleges invest heavily in e-learning projects. Those scholars dedicated to researching technology and pedagogy have been talking about this phenomenon for over a decade, yet the progress made in e-learning in STEM curricula has been modest at best.

The recent onset of MOOCs (massive, online, open courses), a disruptive technology, may force higher education to make more dramatic changes with respect to learning paradigm. The MOOCs phenomenon is not only advancing the notion of open access and the democratization of knowledge, it is integrating a level of creativity in the conceptualization of learning that should help drive innovation in curricular content and delivery in higher-education in the next 2-3 years.

To summarize, organizations dedicated to STEM education should double their efforts in bringing awareness and instilling a sense of urgency with respect to how rapidly the world is changing. Our everyday life is becoming more globalized, and mono-disciplinary approaches are no longer able to provide solutions for the complexity of society’s problems. The role of science, technology and engineering in the development of human culture should be emphasized more in K-12 education, and we must create attractors to recruit more young people, especially women, into STEM careers.

All of these challenges must be supported by substantial, strategic investments in how we create and deliver knowledge to a new generation of digital natives that think and process knowledge differently than a traditionally older generation of educators.

Pedagogy itself requires a much more interdisciplinary and complex systems approach, as we must focus research on how thinking patterns have evolved, and in how the brain itself has created new pathways to process information. Thus, fields such as neuroscience and evolutionary biology are critical partners in this journey of change.