Trends, Issues and Possibilities for an Interdisciplinary STEM Curriculum

In the last decade, the term STEM has been increasingly picked up internationally and come to represent a solution to a range of issues. Within education, STEM is being translated as a curriculum organiser that has the possibility of engaging and retaining students and is interdisciplinary and skills focussed. This paper takes the STEM curriculum as its focus and investigates the influences that have resulted in the current interpretation of STEM as well as the epistemological questions, tensions and issues that this curriculum raises. The paper does this through a consideration of previous and current curriculum movements and debates and in doing so raises questions about the underlying assumptions, form and focus that STEM curriculum take before considering some possible future directions.