About the project
In line with the European Education Area initiatives, the European Commission has identified the urgent need to support the development of its citizens’key competences. When it comes to education, higher education institutions (HEI) play a major role, as they are the ones to educate future teachers. This project focusses on two of the eight key competences, namely competence in mathematics, science, technology and engineering, as well as digital competence. Core of STEM education at school is the transfer of fundamental subject knowledge like functions, electricity and chemical reactions. Learners’ skills and attitudes have not been sufficiently nurtured likewise in traditional standard ways of STEM teaching (Maass, Geiger, Romero & Goos 2019). The Recommendations of the European Council on lifelong learning (Council of the European Union, 2018) however, describe knowledge, skills and attitudes as the three elements of a key competence. Consequently, HEI have to empower future STEM teachers to teach fundamental STEM topics without neglecting skills and attitudes of their future students at school.
For topics bearing controversial aspects or obvious societal relevance - such as environmental degradation or cybersecurity - innovative educational approaches, which enable teachers to not only deliver knowledge but also foster learners’ skills and attitudes, suggest itself. This is much less the case when thinking of chemical reactions, functions or anatomy. The relevance for their lives or society are not obvious to most learners. However, as the acquisition of basic subject knowledge is a vital prerequisite for acquiring related key competences and forms a major part of STEM education, it is imperative to figure out ways how to allow learners to develop key competences in the scope of these seemingly “boring” topics. Unfortunately, there is only little materials available on teaching basic STEM content and the potential to foster the development of key competences in one go.
The proposal addresses the following main target groups:
1.Future STEM teachers (students in ITE programmes)
2.Higher education teaching staff involved in STEM ITE
3.Higher education staff responsible for STEM curricula and course progammes
We concentrate on future teachers as they, after graduating, reach out to many future generations of students at school and can thus function as multipliers.
The highest impact will be achieved for HEI within our Consortium, where we pilot our outputs and implement the planned modules permanently in existing course programmes.
Additionally, we will also reach the same groups beyond partner institutions and countries through various communication, dissemination and exploitation measures.
Read more about this project in the STEMkey flyer.
