Why STEM Education?

1.         How would you describe STEM education to a friend or family member in informal conversation?

STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  STEM education is everything to do with teaching and learning in those fields.  STEM leads to a specific kind of academic environment that demands students to evaluate their surroundings, exercise inquiry, and critically analyze or think about concepts.  STEM education helps to create these critically analytical minds that question and seek answers.  Though there are the different subsets within STEM, a lot of the fields work together to create a cohesive learning arena where skills crossover between different classes.  In today’s age of technology, STEM has more emphasis than ever, and focus on it has become the norm in many school systems.  This concept is termed “STEM literacy” and incorporates different specified skills (“literacies”) necessary to be successful and proficient in STEM.

2.         Why do you think STEM education is (or is not) important?

I may be biased here (Math/STEM > everything else), but STEM is one of the absolute most important, if not THE most important, field in education today.  With the rapidly growing technology and engineering needs of our society, the need for STEM proficient individuals is at an all time high.  As educators, we need to do everything we can to allow our students to access this content and explore future and career possibilities within it.

3.         What is the value of incorporating or enhancing STEM in public education?

Continuing from the previous section, the value is clear in the growing and needy job market in STEM fields.  The basis of primary and secondary public education is to provide students with a well rounded set of knowledge and skills that prepare them to enter society as productive, competent individuals that can accomplish a variety of career or educational tasks (ex. college, trade school, military, general workforce).  Even more so, we want to allow students an opportunity to experience real-world STEM content in order to develop interests and expand their horizons when they are ready to make bigger college and career decisions.  By including or enhancing STEM education to be more authentic, we are giving student more useful,  higher quality material and content with the hopes of sparking their minds to pursue a STEM career.

Additional Thoughts:

I explored several articles and videos pertaining to STEM education in order to deepen my understanding about these topics.  I reviewed articles from sources such as US News, Huffington Post, and The American Association of University Women.  A common topic among the sources involved women and minority presence in STEM career fields, or lack thereof.  I also watched several YouTube videos and Ted talks pertaining to these same issues.  The commonalities in the stagnant minority representation in STEM are definitely alarming and cause for many paradigm shifts in educational models and STEM access within it.  I also reviewed some social media data by focusing mainly of twitter.  I began by looking at Twitter pages of my colleagues, including my principal, administration, and other STEM teachers.  Because of the nature of my school and the community it is in, our teachers and administrators already have an inherent focus on broadening the access to STEM for minority groups.  Again, the common themes among tweets and retweets in our specific educational community focus on access and serving the students by providing pathways to growing fields like STEM. 

These resources reinforced the main point from my initial thoughts.  Before, I focused on the growing and expanding nature of STEM and how that should encourage educators and educational organizations to focus on it to provide our students access to success skills and proficiencies for the 21^st century.  The resources deepened this in the sense that it expanded to touch on the stagnant minority representation in an already needy and growing field.  Many sources also provided ideas and strategies to promote this level of access in our classrooms, especially to minority groups.  I mentioned that by incorporating these strategies, we are increasing the likelihood of sparking interest in these fields, and that is definitely a focus in the resources.

I think the biggest reason to incorporate STEM into education, besides the growing job market, is to develop those STEM-specific literacies and proficiencies.  Even if a student does not follow a STEM career path or is not heavily interested in those fields, the way of thinking and doing in STEM comes into play in other areas of life as well, not just STEM careers.  For example, STEM teaches students to use critical thinking and inquiry, concepts that are beneficial to all people no matter the career field.  I also appreciate the focus in the resources on closing the minority gap. Expanding access to these amazing fields is how we can do best by our students.  It is our job as educators to show students that they can accomplish anything they put their mind to no matter their race or gender.