Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
The concept of integrated STEM education represents the intentional and explicit integration of various disciplines directed towards solving real-world problems and its goal is to prepare students to solve the world pressing issues through innovation, creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration and new knowledge.
Integrated STEM education would have the aim of equipping citizens with the tools they need to live in society and contribute to it, based on the pillars of citizen education: disciplinary knowledge, know-how, substantive comprehension, meta-knowledge, competencies for life and coexistence and competencies for responsible action. Regarding that, we need to retrieve conceptions of science, maths, engineering, computer and information science and technologies that move away from technocracy and conceptualize disciplines as social organizations, knowledge communities and cultural legacy.
NOSTEM
The nature of STEM cannot be just explained as the sum of the natures of the four constituent fields, so this paper proposes a new description of Nature of STEM considering characteristics of all the disciplines.
Aim: the responsible resolution of relevant societal problems within a sustainability matrix. Each of the four disciplines would have its own separate goals—the development of solutions, the understanding of nature, the production of machines, the design of processes, etc.—and any such goals could be discussed with students for their integral literacy.
Methods: nowadays the frontiers between areas are blurred. For example, scientific practices include the regular application of a variety of rules of thumb and intuitive models for solving problems, the making of approximations based on mathematical or computational feasibility and the blackboxing of (parts of) systems through tuning to experimentally determined parameters. All those methodologies could also be used in other disciplines.
Modeling: In science, modeling is understood as a way of knowledge production. In engineering modeling is a strategy for understanding, predicting, and optimizing the behavior of devices or the properties of materials—real or possible. In technology, modeling is usually used to represent the design of a device or its functioning.
Experimentation and design: Design is not an exclusive feature of engineering and it aims at the control of material laboratory phenomena and its manipulation.
Kinds of knowledge: There are 3 types; (1) Designing functional objects and organisms, (2) proof of principle and (3) Innovation.
Closure: All the things, interpretations, uses and perspectives that must take into account when deciding that the problem has been solved.
Validation: Scientists cannot claim ownership of knowledge and they have to communicate their results transparently so they can be replicated. However, in engineering, the degree of expression or codification may be largely due to socio-economic circumstances.
Ethics: technologies exist in an economic context, which means that profitability is often an end that is actively pursued during technological development, sometimes at expense of other goals.
This paper envisages an understanding in integrated STEM education that science, technology, engineering and mathematics are inextricably intertwined and form part of a seamless web of society where politics and economics constitute a central element for preparing young students to engage in responsible action towards a more sustainable and just world. Students will be decision-makers in socio-scientific topics and producers/consumers of new information, knowledge and technologies.