calendar_month 2025
Educators are currently encouraged to interrelate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). A major thrust of such movements is promotion of engineering designs, which government curricula have suggested may help solve problems like the climate emergency, de-speciation, etc. Many students may struggle with this, however, at least due to: omissions and/or distortions about possibly problematic influences of private sector entities on STEM fields and beyond; variations in students’ cultural and social capital may determine their abilities to discover important abstractions; and, with private sector entities manipulating public consciousness of adverse effects of their activities, it may be difficult for students to locate such information through secondary research. At the same time, faith in new technologies solving our various crises appears naïve. Particularly in democracies, successes of any entity (e.g., political leader, value, new technology, etc.) appears to depend on it being enmeshed in a large network of co-supportive living, nonliving and symbolic actants functioning like a machine to achieve congruent goals. Accordingly, in this chapter, we describe our long-term (over 5 years, involving the teacher and students in 8 semesters) efforts to encourage and enable high school science students to imagine networks supporting values, principles, etc. they believe are inherent to their new technologies. Some ontological, epistemological, methodological and axiological successes in this regard seemed to arise from direct application-based teaching about key concepts from Science and Technology Studies, like regulatory capture and sociotechnical imaginaries. Nevertheless, complexities of such teaching indicate needs for further action research regarding values mobilisation.
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