SWOT Analysis of STEM Education in Academia: The Disciplinary versus Cross Disciplinary Conflict

Abstract

In this chapter, we show how to turn a SWOT analysis process of an academic faculty into a strategic plan in a way that fosters the strengths, eliminates the weaknesses, exhausts opportunities, and deals with outside strengths. The case described in this chapter focuses on the Technion’s Faculty of Education in Science and Technology. The SWOT characteristics, though specific to this particular faculty, are also a result of the tensions that exist almost in any universally between teaching and investigating disciplinary content knowledge on the one hand and the application of general pedagogical principles, approaches, and methods on the other hand. On top of these tensions, there are also constraints of funding, human resources, and workload of both faculty and students, which are common to all the academic disciplines. As such, the analysis can serve as a useful managerial tool for coping with the challenges that a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) faculty faces while finding creative avenues for growth and improvement of their teaching and research.