Abstract
To improve students' interdisciplinary learning, it is necessary to find ways to support teacher candidates' views on pedagogical preparation for STEAM practices during teacher education. Thereby, in this chapter, the authors explored the influence of a five-week collaborative cross-disciplinary STEAM module on secondary mathematics, science, and English language arts pre-service teachers' views and lesson planning skills in the context of STEAM integration. As English language arts provide the foundation for students' learning of STEM subjects, the authors conceptualize English language arts as the arts component in the STEAM module. The findings indicated an improvement in pre-service teachers' STEAM conception and showed slight evidence in their STEAM lesson planning skills. Based on the results, the authors further provide possible implications for pre-service teacher education emphasizing STEAM integration.
TopIntroduction
The emphasis on STEM education has been introduced in K-12 and higher education settings to improve students’ advanced learning in STEM fields, increase their interest in STEM subjects, and help students develop practical skills necessary for STEM careers (Blackley et al., 2018; Jamil et al., 2018). While STEM programs provided an ideal curricular approach in attracting students to be engaged with topics in science and mathematics, educators recognized that the focus on STEM subjects was not sufficient in preparing students for 21st-century skills, such as creativity, productivity, inquiry, and collaboration (Harris & de Bruin, 2018; Khine & Areepattamannil, 2019; Quigley & Herro, 2016). With the integration of arts, STEAM education became a pedagogical movement providing new meanings, strategies, and tools for teaching and learning (Peppler & Wohlwend, 2018).
With growing attention toward STEAM, several professional development and teacher education programs have been designed to train practicing and prospective teachers in utilizing effective STEAM conceptions and instructional strategies (Angelone, 2020; Herro & Quigley, 2017; Karppinen et al., 2019). These STEAM-focused teacher education programs benefited teachers to embrace positive attitudes toward STEAM subjects and feel more interested and self-confident in teaching and learning about STEAM (Jaipal-Jamani & Angeli, 2017; Miller-Ray, 2019). Despite these benefits, most teacher preparation curricula do not focus on STEAM education, which results in teachers’ limited knowledge to integrate STEAM subjects within their plans and instructions properly (Czerniak et al., 1999; Harris & de Bruin, 2018; Schmidt & Fulton, 2016).
Research also indicates teachers’ limited views about STEAM education and their difficulties in developing instructional materials with an attention to meaningfully integrating STEAM subjects for instruction (Jamil et al., 2018; Kim & Bolger, 2019; Sias et al., 2016). Especially secondary school teachers perceive STEAM integration as a challenge for their instruction due to their content specializations (Margot & Kettler, 2019; Shernoff et al., 2017; Quigley et al., 2019). Accordingly, scholars recommend that teacher educators design creative ways supporting secondary pre-service teachers’ pedagogical preparation for and valid conceptions about STEAM instruction in a cross-disciplinary collaborative environment (Cetin & Balta, 2017; Harris & de Bruin, 2018; Margot & Kettler, 2019). Regarding these recommendations, for this study, the authors developed a cross-disciplinary collaborative STEAM module for secondary science, mathematics, and English language arts pre-service teachers (PSTs) and examined instructional choices within their STEAM lesson plans (Jacobs et al., 2008; Sias et al., 2016). Considering the influence of teachers’ views on their instructional decisions, the researchers further explored PSTs’ views and conceptions about STEAM education (Jordan et al., 2017; Thompson et al., 2013). The following two research questions guided this study:
- 1)
To what extent does a collaborative STEAM module affect secondary PSTs’ views and conceptions about STEAM education?
- 2)
How does a collaborative STEAM module support secondary PSTs’ ability to develop STEAM lesson plans?
Key Terms in this Chapter
ART: Administration of creativity and self-expression, which may include performance, drawings, music, and creative writing.
Engineering Principles: Principles that are used to design or model a physical phenomenon with the application of mathematical problem-solving skills.
STEAM: An acronym stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics. In our context, A was interpreted as English language A rts.
Technology: Any type of tools developed and used to ease teachers’ or learners’ daily activities. The technology could range from hands-on manipulatives to dynamic geometry software, or any multimedia used to enrich the learning experience.
STEAM Education: The instructional and curricular premise that could be used in any P-12 levels for any content with a focus on teaching the content with scientific thinking (S), technological representation (T), modeling (E), creativity (A), and problem-solving (M).
Transdisciplinary Thinking: Approaching a learnable topic or global theme from different disciplinary perspectives. With transdisciplinary thinking, teachers collaborate to uncover the same topic from different perspectives and activities without compartmentalizing any discipline.
Preservice Teachers: Undergraduate or graduate students that have not completed their teacher education programs which consist of various pedagogy courses and field-based experiences relevant to their content and grade-level preparation.
Inquiry Rich Path: A mindful path and cognitive process of research-focused thinking that starts with the identification of a problem and hypotheses, proceeds with reviewing necessary information, designing an experiment, collecting, and interpreting data, and ending with conclusions over hypotheses.
Teacher Perception: Thoughts, views, beliefs, and assumptions teachers hold onto about pedagogical decisions, instructional theories, or reforms. In our chapter, we strictly focused on examining teacher perception of STEAM Education.