An Integrated Three-year High School STEM Curriculum Based on the Global Grand Challenges (Resource Exchange)

Katherine Levenick Shirey

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Conference: 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access
Location: Virtual On line
Publication Date: June 22, 2020
Start Date: June 22, 2020
End Date: June 26, 2021
Conference Session: Pre-college Engineering Education Division Technical Session 12
Tagged Division: Pre-College Engineering Education
Page Count: 3
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--34136
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/34136
Download Count: 451

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Katherine Levenick Shirey Knowles Teacher Initiative orcid.org/0000-0003-1782-6493

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Dr. Katey Shirey graduated from the University of Virginia with a B.A. in Physics and a B.A. in Sculpture (minor in art history). After teaching sculpture at UVA as an Aunspaugh Fellow, she completed her Masters of Teaching in secondary science also at UVA. Dr. Shirey taught high school physics in Arlington, VA, for five years and became a Knowles Teacher Initiative Teaching Fellow. During this time, she served as a teacher liaison to the IceCube Neutrino Telescope at the South Pole and was a NASA astronaut candidate finalist in 2013. Dr. Shirey earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 2017 after transitioning to study engineering integration in high school instruction as a site of creative thinking in physics learning. She currently works for the Knowles Teacher Initiative as the Knowles Academy Program Officer developing teacher-led professional learning opportunities and facilitating engineering-integration teacher professional development. She serves on the Washington, D.C., Ward 1 Education Council.

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Abstract

This project provides an example of a three-year high school integrative STEM curriculum that uses the Global Grand Challenges of Engineering (NAE, 2008) to drive content learning of traditional high school science (biology, chemistry, and physics), math (Algebra II, geometry, trig, and pre-calculus), engineering, as well as analog and digital technologies practices. Known as the Global STEM Challenges Program (GSCP) (AUTHOR CITATION OMITTED), the content connections between regularly siloed STEM fields may serve as inspiration for a kind of rigorous integrated STEM teaching that is possible in the pre-college setting. STEM education holds the promise of helping students understand how technologies work to help them become STEM literate, and increase problem solving and innovation (Bybee, 2010). However, too often is STEM education merely a rebranding of the regular siloed disciplines represented by STEM (Sanders, 2009) or a combination of math and science only (Bybee, 2010). Truly integrated STEM curriculum must require learning across all four subjects. One definition of integrative STEM learning is “problem-based learning that purposefully situates scientific inquiry and the application of mathematics in the context of technological designing/problem solving” (Sanders, 2009, p.21.) The GSCP curriculum expands upon that definition by recognizing and responding to the curricular standards that high school subjects are bound by. This resource exchange entry will share the curriculum developed to teach 9th-, 10th-, and 11th-grade biology, chemistry, and physics, as well as algebra II, geometry, pre-calculus, introductory calculus, engineering design, and analog and digital technology. The resources shared will include tables that display the course’s sequence broken into 15 instructional units, the grounding engineering design challenge that students tackle for each unit, and each unit's content objectives.

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Shirey, K. L. (2020, June), An Integrated Three-year High School STEM Curriculum Based on the Global Grand Challenges (Resource Exchange) Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34136