As one element to achieve the European Education Area initiatives, the European Commission has identified the urgent need to support the development of its citizens’ key competences. A key competence covers knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed by each citizen to ensure personal fulfilment, a sustainable lifestyle, employability, social inclusion and active citizenship. Core of STEM education at school traditionally is the delivery of fundamental subject knowledge like functions, human anatomy and chemical reactions. Learners’ skills to apply gained knowledge and attitudes to set it in context with their life and societal decision-making processes have not been sufficiently nurtured likewise. Consequently, future STEM teachers have to be empowered to deliver knowledge on fundamental STEM topics without neglecting skills and attitudes of their future students at school. This Strategic Partnership has been launched to provide solutions to support the Commission’s key competence initiative in the scope of STEM education. Our STEMkey consortium gathers higher education (HE) institutions from 12 European countries, covering all STEM disciplines and featuring strong expertise in competence-based and student-centred STEM education research and practice. Our objective is to transform (future) STEM teachers’ grasp of teaching standard topics. To achieve that we will rethink and reshape the delivery of fundamental STEM subject knowledge in the context of key competence development. Future teachers need to be encouraged to refrain from teaching with the sole purpose to transfer knowledge about a single STEM subject, isolated from other STEM subjects. This simply does not live up to todays and tomorrows challenges anymore. 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. They also need to see that STEM subjects are relevant to our lives and our societies and that they are linked to each other. To achieve this objective we will develop teaching modules to be used in HE programmes 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 digital learning or real-life contextualisation. As STEMkey places a strong focus on establishing and nourishing a strong strategic partnership, network options will play an important role and we plan to link to existing initiatives on national and European level and thus embed our results within existing relevant “knowledge pools” (e.g. digital online repositories) and Europe’s STEM education landscape. The STEMkey Partnership Platform serves as main operation base for our project and the partnership. It serves many purposes: external promotion, internal and external communication, dissemination and multiplying results to a wide user group. The proposal addresses the following main target user groups: 1. Future STEM teachers (students in initial teacher education (ITE) programmes) 2. Higher education teaching staff involved in STEM ITE 3. Decision-makers and lead positions, e.g. rectors, deans, heads of STEM education departments at partner institutions 4. Staff responsible for curriculum design and course programs of partner institutions. 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 will add 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). STEMkey tops its impact off with a deliberate dissemination strategy, involving activities such as multiplier events across Europe, a summer school in Portugal, social media measures, provision of explanatory online videos and the STEMkey Partnership Platform. We are positive to have set up a project, which will live up to and exceed its expectations, to fully support the Commission’s Key Competence Initiative and to support the implementation of our results in as many countries as possible.
Our objective was to introduce and implement the EU's Key Competence Framework in Higher Education (HE) programmes for future STEM teachers and to find solutions to transfer the framework into STEM education practice. Therefore, it was necessary to transform our HE partners' and their students‘ understanding and ability to teach standard STEM topics, such as electricity or chemical elements, in two ways: 1) A transformation from the sole purpose of lessons to deliver isolated subject knowledge to lessons which allow learners to develop skills to use gained knowledge and attitudes to responsibly decide on how to use it in various contexts („global challenges“) ==> key competence-based STEM learning. 2) A transformation from delivering isolated knowledge on one specific topic, to a forward-looking approach which connects knowledge from several subjects and disciplines and also connects to the real-world ==> integrated STEM learning. One part of the solution is to make HE partners and future teachers understand the relation between knowledge, skills and attitudes, and how they have an effect on peoples' active citizenship. And consequently, emphasize the role STEM education can play for our future.
One element of the European Education Area is to ensure the development of its citizens' key competences. The reason for this is that these key competences were identified as requirement for a healthy and sustainable lifestyle, active and responsible citizenship and personal and professional fulfilment (COM 2019); and thus, naturally, are of utmost importance for each citizen. A key competence is defined as a combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes (Council of the European Union, 2018). However, maths and science education at school traditionally delivers fundamental subject knowledge e.g. functions and chemical reactions, but learners’ skills and attitudes to use gained knowledge are not sufficiently nurtured likewise (Maass, Geiger, Romero & Goos 2019). This means, there is a mismatch between what citizens need and what most maths and science classrooms nowadays are prepared to offer. Thus, we applied with the STEMkey project to provide solutions to develop key-competences in maths, science, technology and engineering (STEM), including digital and technology-based competences. Therewith, STEM classrooms can contribute to the EU's endeveaours to equip its citizens with key competences.