Reciprocal interplays in becoming STEM learners and teachers: preservice teachers’ evolving understandings of integrated STEM education

Abstract

Integrated STEM education has the potential to develop important skills, competencies and dispositions needed in the twenty-first century. Children’s foundational knowledge is shaped in the early years and primary teachers have therefore been recognised as the gatekeepers to STEM education. Many teachers, however, feel unprepared to teach integrated STEM. This study responds to the call for more evidence on the types of learning experiences needed to prepare STEM-literate preservice teachers. Using pre-/post intervention data from surveys and STEM task analysis documents, as well as reflective journal entries, we report on 30 preservice teachers’ initial understandings of integrated STEM education and explore their evolution across a 12-week intervention, discussing key learning experiences that reportedly led to these changes. The findings suggest that preservice teachers had deeper, more critical understandings of STEM education as a result of the intervention and began to develop a pedagogical toolkit to support STEM learning in the classroom. These developments can be attributed to the powerful interplay that existed between participants’ experiences as STEM learners in coursework and as STEM teachers during field practice. In an effort, however, to address low initial confidence in engineering, we inadvertently tipped the scales of disciplinary balance, at the expense of mathematics.