Education Week: Bringing STEM Into Focus - 2 views
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For example, the K-12 framework effectively turns attention away from a content-specific definition of STEM to a more epistemic one—the sources, strategies, or practices from which science and, by extension, STEM knowledge comes and, in turn, is shared. It may well be that this long-standing inability to come up with an appropriate definition for STEM is an outgrowth of framing STEM as a fixed entity, an "it" instead of an assemblage of practices and processes that transcend disciplinary lines and from which knowledge and learning of a particular kind emerges.
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ogether with shared practices, these three dimensions of the NRC framework—practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas—reflect the realities of contemporary science and engineering, inclusive of mathematics, where concepts and practices, often very dependent on technologies, create productive bridges across STEM disciplines. Such bridges make interdisciplinary collaboration possible and, most importantly, provide a set of strategies and tools unique to the process of STEM learning and teaching.