{"id":2035,"date":"2013-10-10T20:18:04","date_gmt":"2013-10-10T20:18:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/duenos.net\/?p=2035"},"modified":"2013-10-10T20:18:04","modified_gmt":"2013-10-10T20:18:04","slug":"the-value-of-stem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/the-value-of-stem\/","title":{"rendered":"The Value of STEM?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just some disorganized thoughts on this one. So we have this concept called STEM \u2013 Science, Technology, Engineering and Math education \u2013 where the US falls short according to many measures (though, interestingly, our national report card has <a href=\"http:\/\/nces.ed.gov\/nationsreportcard\/tel\/\">yet to include engineering until recently<\/a>). People invoke it as a kind of mandate frequently, and to what purpose matters quite a bit:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If the question is should we be doing things like trying to get more socially excluded populations into engineering \u2013 I\u2019d say absolutely yes. This has as much to do with how we broadly socialize women and people of color to participate in society as it does how they experience education (yes, this too is part of socialization, I realize).<\/li>\n<li>If the question is if we should emphasize STEM activities more in schooling \u2013 I\u2019d say maybe. I wonder what STEM is in opposition to (or an advancement over).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Step 1<\/strong><br \/>\nFirst off, what are we missing if we break it down by basic subjects?<br \/>\nThe humanities, social sciences, languages and the arts.<br \/>\nScratch that, we\u2019ve got STEAM, advocates who take the position that design is what makes innovation in any STEM field possible \u2013 I\u2019d agree on all accounts, except for say, math.<br \/>\nAnd, actually, there\u2019s an interesting similarity between Art and Math \u2013 they both gain considerably more value when embedded in application. Math for Math\u2019s sake is about as relevant or job-related as Art for Art\u2019s sake, I think. Graphic design to communicate ideas or make interfaces more usable \u2013 or \u2013 statistics and predictive algorithms to make experiments possible or to solve problems \u2013 these seem to ring more true to innovation and \u201cusefulness\u201d for me.<br \/>\n<strong>Update:<\/strong> Er, scratch that too &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/nces.ed.gov\/nationsreportcard\/tel\/\">according to the NSF<\/a> &#8220;Science&#8221; here includes the social sciences. I think many people aren&#8217;t including these when they refer to STEM, however. Anyway, continuing&#8230;<br \/>\nSo, generally, do I think we have too much emphasis on the social sciences, languages and humanities in schooling?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Well, at the K-12 level I\u2019m not sure we actually have any significant social science. I mean sure there\u2019s geography and social studies (which is history, really) but generally I don\u2019t see a lot of psychology, sociology, anthropology and political science in high school \u2013 and I think actually it would be great to have more of those. In high schools like mine the tests we were being taught for (ACT\/SAT sure but also more importantly AP tests) didn\u2019t include those, they included emphasis on base subjects like math or English.<\/li>\n<li>Languages, I think offer another similar dimension. Sure learning French or German is probably less useful and a sign of privilege or specialization. But you had better bet Spanish, Portuguese, Russian or Chinese would help you greatly in the future economy and job landscape.<\/li>\n<li>And then we land on the humanities. Generally I\u2019d say that we teach the same American-centric history too many times and that English focuses far too much on making sense of written texts instead of the grand entourage of media we engage with today. These issues aren\u2019t an unsolvable problem, though, we could just focus more on contemporary history and on cultural studies that think of \u201ctext\u201d in a multimodal kind of way. And both of these areas help to emphasize important subset skills \u2013 perspective taking, critical inquiry and rhetoric \u2013 or the effective expression of ideas.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, really, I\u2019m not ready to say we should deemphasize them. I would, however, be ready to suggest that we replace Math class at the high school level with Engineering class \u2013 where advanced math would be taught but always in application to something \u2013 integrated into practice where possible.<br \/>\n<strong>Step 2<\/strong><br \/>\nSecond, what are these disciplines (or subjects) really about? I feel like we\u2019d be better off to think about it in terms of literacies or skills. What kinds of competencies do we want our students to have coming out of an education system. STEM, to me, suggests the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Science &#8211; Experimentation, causality and empiricism, internally consistent truth<\/li>\n<li>Technology \u2013 Well, for me this is digital literacy, and I\u2019ll get to in a second<\/li>\n<li>Engineering \u2013 Problem-solving in an applied context, most often with physical objects or systems<\/li>\n<li>Math \u2013 Problem-solving and algorithms in an abstract context<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, really, I\u2019d agree that we might not be focusing enough on some of these skills, but I\u2019d also say that they\u2019re not any more important than others that might be cultivated by the humanities and social sciences \u2013 critical and creative thinking, expression and perspective-taking and so on.<br \/>\nDigital literacy is hard to really reconcile in all of this \u2013 I see it as a composite of skills and perspectives \u2013 but on another level you could think about just pure competency in being able to manipulate tools as a fundamental. That is, everyone should know how to type, use a mouse and find information on the internet. In my dream world I\u2019d rather say everyone should know how to question the black box, reverse engineer, remix, program, control a 3D interface, draw with a mouse, present stories on the internet and so much more. As you can see my categories already branch into any number of the skills and areas mentioned above.<br \/>\n<strong>Step 3<\/strong><br \/>\nSo, in other words what\u2019s this really about?<br \/>\nI think it\u2019s about an assumption of mapping schooling to jobs. We have great demand for jobs in STEM (and STEAM, really) but not so many in the humanities like history, English and cultural studies or social sciences like sociology, anthropology and political science. And, really, that wouldn\u2019t be a problem if the humanities were like aviation or sculpture, where only a few people go in, make it out and land jobs, but instead we have situations like UIUC, where our highest enrollment major is Psychology (<a href=\"http:\/\/dmi.illinois.edu\/\">1150 students in 2013<\/a>), but there is probably not that much demand for people in psychology-related careers. Similarly we have a rather high count of people in communications (742), political science (552), and animal sciences + vet med (applied but probably not that many jobs \u2013 923). Engineering, science and business majors dominate the majority of enrollment, comparatively. The other \u201cuseless\u201d majors aren\u2019t actually as populated as you might expect \u2013 English (323), history (217), sociology (207), anthropology (126), global studies (195), recreation (163) and so on. Though you do see interesting things like 300 PhD\u2019s in computer science or 90 PhD\u2019s in English but that\u2019s a different issue.<br \/>\nSo, at the end of the day \u2013 I think I want to go back to just focusing on ways to integrate engineering and other practice\/problem-solving based learning into all curriculum for kids and focusing on areas where we have inequalities, such as women enrolled in engineering, or, from a different perspective that\u2019s important to me in particular, men (or extroverts or people of color!) in library science. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just some disorganized thoughts on this one. So we have this concept called STEM \u2013 Science, Technology, Engineering and Math education \u2013 where the US falls short according to many measures (though, interestingly, our national report card has yet to include engineering until recently). People invoke it as a kind of mandate frequently, and to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[108,120,127,352,353,380,409],"class_list":["post-2035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflection","tag-digital-literacy","tag-education","tag-enrollment","tag-steam","tag-stem","tag-uiuc","tag-youth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2035\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}