Obstacles To Interdisciplinary Stem Curriculum: A Bernsteinian Analysis

Abstract

BACKGROUND: While no complete ontological agreement on “STEM” has been reached thus far, consensus has been gradually developing on the role of interdisciplinary STEM education in helping students to develop the cognitive resources required for solving complex problems that demand synthesized and holistic understandings of multiple STEM disciplines. Up till now, many efforts paid by the scholarly and practitioner communities to develop interdisciplinary STEM programmes and curriculums are not at system-scale; and the current study aims to postulate some possible difficulties that hinder more scholars and practitioners from doing so. RESULTS: Through Bernsteinian analysis, three major obstacles to interdisciplinary STEM curriculum development have been identified. Firstly, new curriculum endeavors generally require an identity to guide subsequent collaboration, yet STEM education is yet ill-defined and thus brings about the difficulty to be distinctive from the rest of the total curriculum, or in Bernsteinian term, a weak “external classification”. The definition of STEM education in terms of its components, the lack of a clear statement of its societal application contexts, and the insufficient distinction from competing interdisciplinary curricular efforts have created an “identity crisis” for STEM education, which leads to a weakening if not a lack of organizing principle for STEM curriculum of whatever sorts, interdisciplinary or not. Secondly, the awareness of the processes in addition to the rationales and purposes of curriculum integration is required for the interdisciplinary curriculum development, yet how the contributing disciplines are organized into a unified curricular entity, or the “regionalization” of the “singular”, is not currently the locus of concern. STEM education is presented as a response to the societal changes and requiring contribution from multiple school subjects, yet the insufficient care to the goal-oriented process of the selection and organization of curricular elements hinders the capacity of the resulting curriculums to foster interdisciplinary and integrative problem-solving. As such, cross-disciplinary efforts that attempt to identify connections rather than interdisciplinary efforts that require substantial re-imagination are more commonly seen. The heightening of the awareness of the recontextualization process is thus essential. Lastly, interdisciplinary curriculum development requires the weakening of the insulation of the constituent elements, which is more difficult when the existing insulation among the contribution disciplines, or their “internal classification”, is strong as in the case of STEM education. Science, Technology and Mathematics are insulated in schools in terms of the objects of study, the pedagogical approaches and how the staff involved are organized in schools. In particular, Science and Mathematics have been enjoying a relatively high status in schools for long. The move from their silos towards interdisciplinary STEM education demands the investment and possibly waste of practitioners’ energy, particularly when the attempt is of unknown status and even results. Attractive incentives should thus have to be offered or at least promised for any rational practitioners to participate in leading such a change. CONCLUSIONS: It is hypothesized that the lack of a clear identity, the insufficient awareness of the recontextualization processes necessitated by interdisciplinary integration, and the strong insulation among STEM disciplines are the obstacles for the development of interdisciplinary STEM curriculum, locally and perhaps generally. These underline the need of targeted discoursal and policy interventions to prevent STEM education from being the old wines “mixed” in the new wineskins.