Abstract:
The disciplines encompassed by STEM are currently distinguished by associated bodies of practice, particularly in the practice of research. Analogous distinctions apply in STEM Education, extending to the signature pedagogies that characterise each discipline. Research within STEM Education is similarly differentiated with respect to methods, theories, and questions investigated. Current curricular design reflects restrictive conceptions of field-specificity and the unique integrity of bodies of knowledge encrypted as school subjects. However, references to STEM-related subjects, STEM industries, STEM occupations, STEM ideas and STEM practices are made most frequently not in celebration of interconnected fields of endeavour, but in lament of their fragmented dissolution. Attention must be paid to the affordances of affiliation and research undertaken to explore the legitimacy of STEM disciplines as connected bodies of knowledge and communities of practice offering enhanced educational opportunities through their interconnection. The approach pursued in this presentation is to examine those constructs to which the boundary walls of the STEM disciplines seem most permeable. STEM Education offers opportunities to explore constructs that transcend discipline-specificity and also to identify those constructs idiosyncratic to a particular discipline or field of endeavour. Recent classroom research will be utilised to examine similarities and differences in the manner in which constructs such as: explanation, representation, model, evidence, proof and experimentation are used in mathematics and science classrooms. In each of the classrooms studied, multiple video cameras were used to document the actions of the teacher, the whole class and selected students (either as pairs or intact small groups). Post-lesson video-stimulated interviews with both the teacher and students offered insights into the intentions and interpretations by which classroom interactions might be better understood. Comparison is made of the sources of authority invoked in each classroom, of the types of explanation sought and provided, of the referents by which uncertainty was resolved, and of the nature and function of the various representations and other artefacts that characterise classrooms in each disciplinary setting. Effort might be employed to connect constructs evident in both types of classroom and thereby the theories employed by researchers in each discipline. STEM Education can offer more than merely the consolation of coalition. It can provide a vehicle for new forms of inclusive research design. This paper will illustrate some of the conceptual bases on which disciplinary and theoretical inclusivity might be effected in the context of educational research and some of the impediments to its realisation.