Dear Colleagues,
The STEM-based education of the 21st century strives to find a balance between student skills and competency development in the classroom, as well as engaging students with the breadth of informal and out-of-school contexts available today. However, rising to the challenge of complex and ‘wicked’ problems, both in local and global contexts, requires proactive steps across all sectors of education, including in informal education.
Teachers are often specialised in particular subjects or disciplines, although by exploring informal STEM contexts, STEM can refer to individual STEM disciplines or integrated approaches to STEM.
For this Special Issue of the Education Sciences journal, we invite submissions aiming to present recent advances in research, theory, policy and practice relating to the relevance of informal STEM education. We welcome interdisciplinary or subject-specific approaches to science, technology, engineering or mathematics and encourage submissions incorporating action research, evaluations, case studies, mixed methods, as well as qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis.
Key questions that could be addressed include, but are not limited to:
- What education values and contributions occur outside of the formal education setting?
- How can teachers engage with STEM practice, learning and teaching in ways that occur outside of their formal classrooms?
- How can teaching and learning be incorporated into nonschool settings, such as science, maths and technology learning centres and museums, or into outreach and extracurricular programs based inside or outside the university or industrial sector settings?
- How can policy influence education in informal STEM settings? What is needed to capture the regulatory requirements around how teachers approach teaching science, maths and technology?
- What practices can encourage the engagement of teachers with citizen science initiatives, socioscientific issues and activism, such as in energy technology, climate change and sustainable development?
Dr. Seamus Delaney
Dr. Linda Hobbs
Guest Editors
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 16 September 2022
More information: https://lnkd.in/eC5eticK