Linda Hobbs

Successful Students – STEM Program: Teacher Learning Through a Multifaceted Vision for STEM Education

The current STEM education agenda is driven by the belief that STEM skills are crucial to innovation and development in our contemporary, technological, knowledge-based, competitive global economy (Office of the Chief Scientist, Science, technology, engineering and mathematics: Australia’s future. Australian Government, Canberra, 2014; Australia’s STEM workforce: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Australian Government, Canberra, 2016). This chapter articulates a comprehensive, multifaceted and coherent STEM vision that addresses the subtle and complex challenge of preparing “twenty-first-century” citizens within the constraints of a traditional school system and curriculum. For STEM education to be incorporated effectively and sustainably in schools, a STEM vision needs to be inclusive of school-specific needs. In this chapter, we report on our preliminary insights from a teacher professional development programme operating in ten schools in Victoria, Australia, designed to develop year 7 and 8 science, technology and mathematics teachers’ capacity to teach STEM. Evaluative data from the first year of this three-year programme is presented to illustrate the variety of classroom activities that can arise from a comprehensive STEM vision. The research is showing that a STEM vision needs to be more than discrete STEM-related activities slotted into an already bulging curriculum to be sustainable.

The Heart of the Educator: Aesthetic Experience Shaping Knowledge, Identity, and Passion

This chapter explores Dewey’s construct of aesthetic experience and the role that the aesthetic plays in knowing: knowing as a coherence of things to be known, developing one’s sense of identity in relation to that knowing, and the passions that emerge in an “aesthetic experience” that lays the foundation for future knowing, identity, and passions. Drawing on Dewey’s ideas, Girod, Rau, and Schepige developed the construct “aesthetic understanding” to provide a theoretical lens for describing students’ experience of coming to know science content. This chapter develops the aesthetic understanding construct further into a methodological framework, called a knowledge-identity-passion (KIP) analysis, that can be applied to research exploring aesthetic experience in two “research moments”: the immediate effects of an aesthetic experience on knowledge, identity, and passion and the life trajectory that follows an aesthetic experience. A KIP analysis can be applied to research examining the effects and meanings attached to experiences through close analysis of knowledge, identity, and passion, both individually and in relation to each other. To illustrate the power of a KIP analysis, narratives of four science educators are provided. The practical applications and methodological possibilities and limitations of a KIP Analysis are then discussed.

Growing Through Partnerships

While partnerships in teacher education are essential for ensuring adequately preparing teachers, the effects of these partnerships are difficult to capture. The STEPS project analysed five models of a school-based approach to teaching primary science education. These five partnership models were developed to give pre-service teachers a supported, authentic experience of teaching science to school children. The effects of these teaching opportunities for pre-service teachers are explored in this chapter as “growth”: where growth occurs, how this is evidenced, and what is needed to enable growth. A series of vignettes documenting the experiences of pre-service teachers, teacher educators, teachers and principals were developed from interview data, from which a series of themes emerged. A meta-analysis of these themes revealed some common elements across the vignettes that seemed to mark the professional growth of the various stakeholders in terms of shaping their identity and confidence, praxis and relationships. Growth must be evident, measured and documented if the effort to initiate and maintain such partnerships is going to be worthwhile. The question of how to measure growth occurring as a result of partnerships is interrogated in this chapter through the use of data and is linked with current research literature. A growth model is presented, as is an accompanying set of variables that can be used to measure the effects of education-based partnerships.

Negotiating Partnerships in a STEM Teacher Professional Development Program: Applying the STEPS Interpretive Framework

This chapter describes the use and modification of the tools of the STEPS Interpretive Framework as part of a teacher professional development program for STEM teachers. The tools were used to assist with establishing partnerships with schools that were important for determining the content, timing and nature of the professional learning program cycles. The use of the Interpretive Framework as a mediating tool that both changes the nature of the activity and is also changed by the activity is discussed.

Models of School-Based Practice: Partnerships in Practice

This chapter describes the five individual models of school-based practice involving university–school partnerships, each presented as a single case study. Each partnership was independently developed, and there are both common and unique characteristics of the partnership and the pedagogical practices that emerge when a cross-case analysis is conducted. This variety illustrates that there is not one way to work in partnerships in teacher education. Each case study is presented including a set of pedagogical principles that are common across the case studies, and set of themes are developed that are further explored in Part 2 of this book.