Beyond Boundaries: Pre-Service Teachers' Experiences of Transdisciplinary Education via STEAM Making Projects

摘要

Though today's problems are interconnected,complicated,and unpredictable,students continue to gain knowledge in discrete,standardized disciplinary silos.When subject inte-gration is discussed in STEM and STEAM (STEM + Arts) literature,there is little consensus on what constitutes or should constitute integration of the disciplines.Pre-service teachers have been shown to teach in ways that combine the methods and skills they gained during their education with an imitation of the manner in which they were taught.This highlights one of the major institutional barriers underlying integrated STEAM education,as most pre-service teachers are taught,and therefore expect to teach,specialized subjects.This case study used a transdisciplinary approach to problem-based learning and invited pre-service teachers to apply inte-grated STEAM and practices of making to provide solutions addressing student dropout rates in their local district.Find-ings show the group struggled to move beyond their initial solution,even though it did not adequately address the prob-lem.Further,this research indicates that students need con-structive criticism from an outside voice in addition to sup-port from a mentor to increase their engagement and success.