STEM Education As a GERM: Reviewing Australia’s STEM Discourse

Abstract

This paper reviews the Australian discourse on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and STEM education apparent in selected texts including those published by the Australian Government. Like the GERM (global education reform movement) contagion that it is, STEM only really officially reached the shores of Australia when in 2012 our Chief Scientist began a series of utterances (speeches, media interviews, reports, position papers and the like) that purposefully included this acronym. The paper investigates the appointment of Australia's most recent Chief Scientist whose biography sees him well suited to promoting STEM as human capital production within the enterprise society. It describes the neoliberal underpinnings of STEM including a crisis discourse that marginalises other perspectives of science education, effectively narrowing its possibilities.