Forming and transforming STEM teacher education: A follow up to pioneering STEM education

This paper discusses the ongoing processes and challenges for designing an introductory undergraduate STEM Education course, as informed by the perspectives of two administrators and eleven instructors who have taught the course repeatedly, including its revisions and modifications. After four years of multiple iterations, we consider our course to be an innovative cornerstone of the undergraduate education program for several reasons including: 1) an intentional course design focus on deepening student's engagement in science, mathematics, engineering and technology content through innovations in pedagogy and inquiry approaches and, 2) a course planning process that engages instructors in continuous conversations about how to rethink and reshape current models of STEM education within authentic ecologies of research, design and connections with real-world sociotechnical contexts beyond the acquisition of technical skills. The course invites a rethinking of how STEM education can be envisioned as transdisciplinary inquiry approaches for understanding issues and problems in the inhabited world. Judging by the positive experiences of most students in the program and the increasing quality of student's final assignments and projects each year, our appraisal of the course, is very positive. Collectively, the instructional team's capacity as STEM educators has strengthened and deepened over time. We have successfully created a team of joint inquirers and developed an atmosphere of mutual support while still encouraging deep and critical engagement with the STEM Education course work. Now, we are beginning to turn our attention to the observed differences in attitudes between elementary and secondary student teachers towards STEM Education, as reported in this paper. In particular, we noticed how positive the student teachers for the early years and elementary cohorts were compared to the resistance encountered in the student teachers for the secondary cohorts. Unless this resistance is addressed, the secondary cohorts may not be able to align their future teaching in manners consistent with the goals of the education program. To gain insight into this difference, we begin to situate our observations in the traditional perspectives that frame disciplinary identity and systemic structures of schooling.