Essential Application-Based Teaching: Addressing Omissions and Distortions in STEM Education
摘要
There is much to celebrate about science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), including human longevity from medical and agricultural techno-sciences. There also are, however, many risks and harms associated with some STEM fields. Some crises, like the climate emergency, dramatic species losses and potential nuclear annihilation, are said to be existential. Other crises, meanwhile, seem entrenched and ongoing, such as cancers from manufactured foods, manipulation from surveillance capitalism and drug deaths from over-prescription of pain killers. Most worrisome, perhaps, is that many of these crises may co-affect each other, thus possibly created more intense, while somewhat unpredictable, crises. At the same time, they seem inertial; increasing and resisting solutions. Given, however, that their resilience may result, mainly, from pro-capitalist dispositifs (‘biased’ networks) composed of such co-supportive actants as financiers, corporations, free-market think tanks, transnational groups (e.g., World Trade Organization), many governments, many STEM fields, communication and transportation networks, it seems that critics of pro-capitalist dispositifs must work to promote development of pro-‘ecojustice’ dispositifs. Given strong correlations between developments in STEM fields and societal zeitgeists, it seems that STEM education is a fruitful area of focus for development of more ecojust societies. In this chapter, we suggest—with empirical supports—that extents to which students designed and conducted research-informed and negotiated action projects that accommodated the dispositif concept to analyse roles of different social actors (e.g., corporations) depended on extents to which the teacher used application-based teaching vs. inquiry-based learning.