Abstract
A defining characteristic of contemporary trends in global education policy is the promotion of STEM learning in the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors of education as a means to generate innovation and prosperity in the economy. Intertwined with common sensical assumptions about future labor markets and the transformative potential of technology in education, STEM has become a hegemonic discourse informing policy formation and educational practice. In Gramscian terms, the struggle over STEM as a discursive practice, between proponents of instrumental learning of marketable economic skills and those of education towards humanistic goals, reveals insights about the ideological characteristics of the push for STEM learning. This article explores the power dynamics behind the push for STEM learning as an ideological discourse propagated by global networks of elite policy actors and enacted by non-elite policy actors at the school level. The findings point toward a disjuncture between the discourse of elite policy actors in the US, the realities of STEM labor markets, and the actualization of this policy discourse into classroom practice. The implications of this study indicate that analyses of vertical power relations in network governance in STEM education should attend to the semiotics, materiality, and mutability of networked spaces.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 267-298 |
| Number of pages | 32 |
| Journal | Cultural Studies of Science Education |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 1 2018 |
Funding
The first source is two popular texts associated with Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation: Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (Christensen, Johnson, and Horn ) and “Disruptive Diplomas: The Future of Education” in Seeing What’s Next: Using The Theories Of Innovation To Predict Industry Change (Christensen, Anthony, and Roth ). The Clayton Christensen Institute bills itself as a nonprofit think tank that uses funding from philanthropic organizations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Jaquelin Hume Foundation and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and corporate donors, such as IBM Research and Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, “to apply theories of disruptive innovation to develop and promote solutions to the problems of education” (Internal Revenue Service ). After initial data analysis, four chapters from Disrupting Class and “Disruptive Diplomas” were selected for in-depth analysis.
Keywords
- Cultural studies
- Innovation
- School reform
- STEM crisis
- STEM education
