The EU-funded project STEMkey (‘Teaching standard STEM topics with a key competence approach’, 2020-2023) will enable future STEM teachers to refrain from teaching with the sole purpose of knowledge-transfer of a single STEM subject. This simply does not measure up to todays and tomorrows challenges anymore. Instead, STEM teachers will learn how to nurture their students’ key competences when delivering standard STEM content, which means to deliver subject knowledge and allow the development of skills and attitudes to use this knowledge in various societal and real-life contexts in equal measure.
A major part hereby is to use an integrated STEM education approach, which means, STEM education across disciplines. Interdisciplinary STEM education! FIND OUT MORE!
One part of the solution is to train future teachers in “being STEM key competent”. They need to understand the relation between knowledge, skills and attitudes, how they affect each other and how they have an effect on their students’ learning experience and personal life.
In this context, interdisciplinary STEM teaching and learning is the way to go, as it demonstrates the linkages between each STEM subject, each STEM topic…and, in the bigger picture, each solution in the context of maths, science, engineering and technology.
Hardly any decision in real life can be made within a box. We must think outside the box and develop an understanding how everything is connected, how systems evolve…and how we can improve systems, how we can improve life…when learning and working across disciplines.
To achieve this objective, we develop teaching modules to be used in Higher Education programmes and training for future STEM teachers, covering all STEM disciplines and exemplarily dealing with topics from each discipline (e.g. light representing physics education, algorithms representing informatics or the periodic system representing chemistry). Each module applies various tested and proven innovative educational approaches, such as inquiry-based learning, digital learning or real-life contextualisation.
As STEMkey places a strong focus on establishing and nourishing a strong strategic partnership, network options play an important role.
Although responsibility for Higher Education rests within the EU Member States, cooperation in this field is imperative. Fundamental STEM topics across Europe are alike: chemical reactions, functions, anatomy, etc. are taught in each country. Jointly rethinking traditional teaching contents is a challenging process, as decades of teaching tradition have to be examined with impartiality and new creativity but without losing sight of experience. Transnational cooperation adds value to the actual reshaping process as we can view the various STEM topics from many angles and consequently enrich each teaching module.
Naturally, cross-border collaboration during the output production process and evaluation results, stemming from a multi-country perspective, help us to design each module as universally applicable as possible (across different contexts, cultures and political systems).
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We address the following main target user groups:
