STEM Sells

It's Thursday afternoon, and I'm sitting in a lecture theatre at Western Sydney University simply because the professional learning on STEM has been offered as a free seminar. I've heard this acronym a few times over the last year and since it's free I thought I should come see what's it all about. 

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths. The STEM organisation has grown as a response to Australia's flagging home-grown talent in these areas, in the hope that better ties can be made between high schools and industry to plug the gap. I'm paraphrasing here, but one great opening idea to this lecture ran as thus, "The more connections a young person has with industry, the higher their chance of post-school success". STEM seeks to embed this philosophy into Australian education through the support of the Beacon Foundation and Origin Foundation, in the hope that our senior students will start selecting these subjects in greater numbers.

This chart shows the Top 10 performing countries for Maths, Sciences and Reading (please excuse the poor lighting).

Many students are not choosing STEM subjects at high schools. For example, the number of students who don't study maths at all has tripled in recent times. In Australia, 30% of staff in some STEM sectors are manpower imported from overseas, and coders created in this country are almost all male. The Beacon Foundation seeks to connect STEM businesses with schools in order to build more productive pathways into these industries.

So where do my KLAs English and History fit in? Well, if you want to be a teacher, you will - believe it or not - find that STEM skills are highly useful in working as an effective educator in our increasingly administrative and data-driven profession. It's also believed by the STEM organisation that 1/3 of the jobs of the future haven't been invented yet, so I think we should also therefore consider that current jobs will also undergo additional evolution in conjunction with technology and use of data. The way that teachers teach in the future will be radically different to the way we teach now, in much the same way that current professional expectations contrast quite heavily with the way teaching was conducted 30 years ago. 

From a content-driven standpoint, English in particular can actually contribute to the deficit in STEM industries by addressing gender stereotypes. The sheer dearth of females in STEM jobs in Australia has been borne out of gender stereotyping that continues to persists as an ingrained aspect of Western society. This is where the importance of the English curriculum comes into play, with several opportunities throughout Years 7 to 12 to address our society's cultural constructs regarding gender, which should help encourage more teenage girls to become interested in STEM subjects. Additionally, from a STEM standpoint, we should also be ensuring that numeracy is as accounted for in humanities subjects as we'd like literacy to be catered for in the STEM subjects.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this seminar was an interview panel with some industry professionals. From left to right in the picture above, we have:

• Andy McDaid - manager of sourcing programs for Origin Energy
• Sean Barrett - Head of Origin Foundation
• Mark Bernhardt - Senior HSE Business Partner - Origin Energy (Health Sector Environment)
• Ben St Clair - Manager, Market Risk Development - Origin Energy 
• Catherine Attard - Associated Professor WSU
• Scott Harris - Chief Exec of Beacon Foundation

Each spoke about their interest in STEM subjects and the ways these domains of knowledge are imperative for their respective industries. 

This chart shows the motivations behind teachers choosing to specialise in STEM subjects. Blue = 47%, Darker Green = 29%, Light Green = 24%

Barriers to student uptake of STEM subjects. Green = 32%, Grey = 26%, Dark Blue = 30%, Light Blue = 16%, Orange = 16%

How much do we currently engage industry in the delivery of our curriculum? No = 49%, Sometimes = 14%, Yes = 37%.

WARNING: I'm going to get political now, so close this tab if you don't want to think about all of this too negatively.

STEM ultimately wants to prevail in creating an 'innovation pedagogy'. There is, however, one great irony that needs addressing here - in a political regime that promotes 'innovation', why is education funding so poorly considered by Malcolm Turnbull's government? For STEM and other areas ripe for future breakthroughs, our culture isn't going to change while education is so undervalued by the blokes in power (and let's face it, most of them still are men). 

At the time of writing, the government has pledged $12 million towards restoring a focus on STEM subjects. Under a purely equitable model, that equals $8 per school. You can't even buy one calculator for that much. And let's face it, without better literacy in our schools, how are we even going to get students to engage with higher order skills in STEM subjects? With that point, I would say that funding needs to go to all areas of education in order to improve STEM, not just the STEM subjects. 

This is through no fault of the STEM organisation, at least no more than any other aspect of Australian society being the fault of voters. All I'll say is: when you vote, think about how much money that particular political party is willing to put into education. Nothing is going to happen in this culture of ours without better funded education. We talk about the future as being a space that needs to be prepared for, but what about now? Students need us now. 

For more information, check out these websites.

Beacon Foundation

Origin Foundation