EDF5312 Contexts of STEM education

This unit aims to encourage you to consider how the principles defining a problem based learning (PBL) approach can be used to enhance learning opportunities in STEM education. You will be encouraged to draw from experience in the unit and research literature to collaboratively work with other participants to consider what socio-scientific issues (SSIs) are and how these might be used with PBL to develop an interdisciplinary or integrated sequence of STEM learning. Your thinking will be positioned within the context of interdisciplinary STEM learning and you will explore considerations of some of the challenges which may be associated with such interdisciplinary learning. You will consider how interdisciplinary learning in STEM requires educators to create particular conditions for learning and this necessitates educators to work with their students in particular ways to encourage flexible knowledge, skills and capabilities, active and strategic metacognitive reasoning, collaboration and authentic and relevant learning contexts.