Eric Iversen
STEM has left the building
For a long time, advocates of STEM education have worked to bring STEM learning closer to students’ lives outside of school. This year, though, COVID has made STEM learning a part of students’ lives outside of school – and in the home – in ways nobody ever imagined or wanted. The move to at-home school abruptly air-dropped parents and children into a new teacher-student relationship with little guidance in how to make it all work in a home converted into a part-time classroom. Though stressful and disruptive, this shift in roles can also open teacher-parents and student-children to new possibilities for growth and learning in both academic and personal realms. At-home STEM education, in fact, can pair interestingly and richly with social-emotional learning (SEL) to become a vehicle for promoting connectedness and resilience among family members, a boon for all in a time when tragedy and hardship have touched everyone.
The things we’ve lost
With schools closed or open in only limited fashion, educators have been managing the switch to emergency remote learning to the greatest of their abilities, and the resources and strategies that have been shared across the K-12 world are voluminous. Even so, there is no doubt that uprooting STEM education from the school building comes with many kinds of loss, including carefully designed classroom and lab spaces set up with technical equipment and materials that are impossible to replicate in the home. And losing access to other members of class during STEM activities also hurts. It cuts students off from the collaborative learning that fuels so much of the growth in knowledge, interest, and connectedness to their peers that the classroom environment provides. And these are just the headline losses; many people would have other items of their own to add.
New opportunities, though
At-home STEM education, however, can be liberating and generative, too. For example, getting a question wrong or failing in some way in front of peers in the classroom can register more painfully on children than the same experience at home with a parent. In fact, the different affective environment of the home can enable learning – and connection – at a different, perhaps deeper, level than what happens at school. Because the parent-child relationship often encompasses such a wider range of social-emotional experiences than the teacher-student relationship, a child’s learning experience at home has the potential to accommodate a greater degree of social-emotional content.
The STEM-SEL formula
In fact, STEM learning and SEL can mutually reinforce lessons drawn from both realms. The Partnerships in Education and Resilience (PEAR) Institute at the McLean Hospital in suburban Boston supports diverse research programs in SEL. One thread of the research agenda addresses STEM learning through a multifaceted assessment framework that blends both STEM and SEL principles and practices. A “whole-child” model of psychological balance, the PEAR framework rests on four pillars of learning that can serve as a de facto checklist for families to use in their own at-home STEM learning activities. Not only do the four pillars encompass desiderata for STEM learning, they also open up space for parents to mesh STEM learning with support for childrens’ social-emotional well-being. In this way, at-home STEM learning can also serve as a bulwark against harms children might be suffering from pandemic-related stress and loss.
The PEAR Institute model has cross-cutting components, applicable to both STEM and SEL activities. They can be summarized as follows, per a presentation by PEAR Director Gil Noam:
Active engagement – hands-on, kinetic experience with learning that moves students’ bodies.
Assertiveness – expression of individual experiences and thoughts in students’ own, authentic voices.
Belonging – learning and activity undertaken in collaboration and informed by interdependence and shared purpose.
Reflection – space and time dedicated to making meaning of experience and integrating it into a student’s identity.
All four of these items describe features of effective STEM as well as social-emotional learning programs. Parents who can incorporate these components into at-home STEM activities will be fostering both academic and social-emotional learning, and the shared learning experience can enrich and strengthen connectedness between parent and child along the way.
How people are making it work
Various STEM education efforts have responded to COVID conditions by working to assimilate SEL principles into learning activities. Vivify STEM offers granular, point-by-point guidance for particular STEM activities that support SEL competencies such as self-awareness and responsible decision-making. They illustrate how Sphero robots, Ping Pong-ball design challenges, and model sailboat construction exercises can be used to boost SEL. The Indiana Department of Education has laid out specific examples of how educators and families can encourage SEL growth through STEM-based learning activities. Opportunities for students to connect STEM and SEL include programs and activities that range from the local to the global.
As vehicles of learning adjacent to at-home schooling, out-of-school programs are uniquely positioned to relieve some of the burdens thrust onto parents. And program leaders clearly grasp the potential for STEM-SEL combinations. Learn Fresh manages NBA Math Hoops, for example, and CEO Nick Monzi has said, “As a foundational principle of our work, we believe that every STEM program should have an embedded social-emotional component.” Girlstart has amplified training for college-age mentors who lead their STEM programs in ways to connect with younger participants and, as Executive Director Tamara Hudgins notes, “they take care in every moment to foster a sense of belonging for every girl.”
The best case
Through these examples and others, families can find inspiration or even specific guidance for how to make STEM and SEL work together in the home. In whatever way the combination takes shape, the synergy of learning across STEM and SEL modalities can feed reservoirs of resilience in children. Experiencing learning and growth within an emotional landscape of balance and connectedness can inoculate children against damage in social, academic, and developmental realms that could otherwise result from the loss of in-school time during the pandemic. To be sure, daily life during COVID has often been a bewildering blur. But there are opportunities that have arisen from the challenges of remote learning that teachers and parents can run with, including the incorporation of SEL principles into STEM learning, and vice versa.
Eric Iversen is VP for Learning and Communications at Start Engineering. He has written and spoken widely on STEM education and related careers. You can write to him about this topic, especially when he gets stuff wrong, at eiversen@start-engineering.com.
You can also follow along on Twitter @StartEnginNow.
The award-winning 2nd edition of Cybersecurity Career Guide shows middle and high schoolers what cybersecurity is all about and how they can find the career in the field that’s right for them. Now with an updated Student Workbook and new Teacher’s Guide for classroom or afterschool use!
To showcase STEM career options, pair our cybersecurity books with the updated 3rd edition of our Engineering Career Guide.
We’ve also got appealing, fun engineering posters and engaging books for PreK-2 and K-5.
Our books cover the entire PreK-12 range. Get the one that’s right for you at our online shop.