STEM Café: Embracing Integrated STEM Education

The Department of STEM Education faculty constantly seek to evolve in response to insights gained from research, policy and curriculum. Since 2017, after an initial period of writing practitioner articles to introduce the concept of integrated STEM, colleagues across the STEM disciplines have collaboratively explored integrated STEM education across a range of practice-based projects:

1. Since 2018, six MIC STEM teacher educators worked alongside student teachers and primary teachers to co-create and implement an integrated STEM lesson in a local STEM-focused primary school (school-college partnership).

2. From 2019, a subgroup of four MIC STEM colleagues explored key Irish STEM education stakeholders' perspectives of integrated STEM. This research group also unpacked the features of effective STEM professional development.

3. In 2021, STEM teacher educators across the department collaborated to complete a systematic literature review exploring effective interventions that support integration of STEM and the Arts across the early years, primary and post-primary sectors (commissioned Department of Education research report).

4. Since May, 2021, STEM education colleagues have collaborated on the Buzzing with Bees project that seeks to develop an increased awareness of the worldwide threat to pollinators and viable actions to address this. Given the potential role of education in affecting change, this project fosters a creative and innovative response to the problem through collaboration between teacher educators (colleagues and faculty of George Mason), student teachers, community beekeepers, primary teachers and their pupils in various schools across Limerick and Clare as well as internationally (Global classroom project).

5. Since Autumn, 2024, STEM colleagues across the department are working on a new project called 'DIGging STEM! Design-, Inquiry- and Games-Based approaches to STEM Education' to reveal the potential role of games-based approaches to STEM learning.

The work of this group also influenced the Lesson Study work - where research lessons (2020, 2022, 2023, 2024) explored a range of approaches to integrated STEM education across the primary school.

The research has informed the development of various STEM modules at undergraduate and postgraduate levels as well as our STEM outreach.

All of this innovative, high-quality work in integrated STEM education promotes long-term educational, socio-cultural and economic impacts.