Although not all of the articles this week explicitly utilized an educational framework, except for maybe the Barton article, it was really interesting to switch things up and read about other current topics being looked at regarding STEM education. The articles by Cohen and Hughes both highlighted the importance of community in learning as well as the impact of social interactions as well. Although the articles by Cohen and Hughes don’t necessarily undertake an educational framework, I believe they still are immersed in the world of situative learning and would advocate for those educational practices.
Starting with the Cohen article, I would have never expected them to produce the results that they did. I would have expected their results to show that girls learn the stereotypes attributed to STEM at an early age (which they do prove), but when they specifically got into the early STEM experiences that shape their STEM identities, I would have assumed things like baking would increase their interest in analytics and food science which exist in STEM (pg. 6). Sadly, their opposing results do make sense to me though seeing as cooking/baking is branded as a feminine activity that doesn’t align with a supposed masculine discipline like STEM. I feel as this result can be used to highlight the importance of educators realizing the implicit social/gender structures that undergird every domain in education. In contrast to girls having lesser STEM identities, it makes me wonder if boys have lesser literature identities being that it is a subject that is typically deemed feminine? I think this awareness is a great takeaway from this research. I think a similar message can be taken from the Hughes article as well though. Even though it is an empirical study discussing how LGBQ students are retained in STEM, the researcher’s methods of excluding prior preparation in STEM help prove that there are non-scholastic factors that influence students’ STEM identities. Once again, I feel as if this awareness should be used to emphasize the need for teachers to understand the social underpinnings of students’ self-efficacy and identities in different domains of education in order to better support their growth into practitioners.
The last article by Barton and her colleagues does fit within the situated learning framework in my opinion. The entire focus of the paper was how social collaboration and empathy can be worked into engineering education, but the results focused on 3 new discourse types that the observed teacher cocreated with her students, which in my opinion screams situated learning. Not only did the teacher foster a very diverse learning community, but she also made discourse a tenet of her curriculum. She even went further than just classroom discourse but had students discussing their ideas with the community at large and the school community. Through these discourse methods, students were able to create new understandings of things like “sustainability” and “empathy” that were then displayed in their project artifacts. I really enjoyed the teacher’s new method of empathy discourse though, as that seems to be something that doesn’t get discussed much in fact-laden STEM fields that historically don’t place much value on socioemotional practices within the domain.
Hi Nick,
Agree with your assessments of the articles. I think you made an interesting point about the dangers of assumptions when being a teacher. This is especially important in the way we are trying to teach by picking authentic activities that are relevant to our students. If we pick activities based on assumptions about our students and not what really is important to them we are doing our students a disservice.