A Critical Examination of STEM Issues and Challenges [Paperback]

This critical examination of STEM discourses highlights the imperative to think about educational reforms within the diverse cultural contexts of ongoing environmental and technologically driven changes. Chet Bowers illuminates how the dominant myths of Western science promote false promises of what science can achieve. Examples demonstrate how the various science disciplines and their shared ideology largely fail to address the ways metaphorically layered language influences taken-for-granted patterns of thinking and the role this plays in colonizing other cultures, thus maintaining the myth that scientific inquiry is objective and free of cultural influences. Guidelines and questions are included to engage STEM students in becoming explicitly aware of these issues and the challenges they pose.

Chapter 2 Avoiding the Separation of Science and Culture

Chapter 3 An Overview of What Scientists Need to Know About the Cultures They are Transforming

Chapter 4 The Cultural Mediating Nature of Technique and Technologies: Another Area of Silence in the Education of Western Scientists

Chapter 5 Educating the Next and Perhaps Last Generation of Scientists and Technologists

Chapter 6 How an Uncritical Reliance upon Print and Data

Misrepresents the Emergent, Relational, and Interdependent World of All Ecologies

Chapter 7 Helping STEM Students Recognize the Political Categories that Support an Ecologically Sustainable Future

Chapter 8 How STEM Teachers can Address the Fear and Ecological Uncertainties by Introducing lÃ$