Workshop on the Substance of STEM Education: Addressing the Gap Between Foundational, Meta, and Humanistic Knowledge

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With support from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR), this project aims to serve the national interest by developing a vision for STEM education that will prepare students for emerging technical and societal challenges. This project will convene discussions to explore current and future contexts for STEM education. Building off these discussions, the project will envision models for future STEM education. The project will consider STEM education from a perspective that integrates foundational knowledge (to know), meta-knowledge (to act), and humanistic knowledge (to value). The investigators expect that this perspective will provide better alignment of STEM education with technical and societal challenges than a knowledge-centric education. The project focuses on two gaps in current STEM education models. The first is the gap between the need for students to learn STEM concepts and the need for them to develop the creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills needed for ethical decision-making and action. The second gap occurs because STEM courses and degree programs continue to reside within traditional STEM disciplinary boundaries, even as our most pressing problems require interdisciplinary work. The project's goal is to collaboratively establish a vision for the future of STEM education and develop a well-articulated framework that describes this future. This project will build a virtual community of practice that will meet in person to articulate a framework for the future of STEM education with potential to achieve the project vision. The pre-workshop activities will consist of a series of open internet-based discussions featuring invited expert keynotes. The objective of the discussion includes: (1) to build a community of practice; (2) to acquaint participants with the motivation, context, and key concepts of the workshop; and (3) to envision and converge on the curricular types, learner personas, and agenda for the workshop. Workshop participants will be selected from this community of practice, based on their expertise, knowledge, engagement, and leadership in the field. At the two-day, studio-format workshop, approximately 50 expert participants will engage in an iterative set of facilitated design-based exercises to develop prototype curricula. Following the workshop, the developed curricula will be openly available to the wider community of practice, with the aim of fostering an emergent network that will continue to collaboratively develop and iterate content and resources. If successful, the framework, curricula, and community of practice developed through this project has the potential to provide a pathway for evolving undergraduate STEM education to better meet rapidly emerging economic, environmental, and societal challenges.The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. This project is within the Engaged Student Learning track, which supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.