About this Research Topic
Research demonstrates that STEM disciplines perpetuate a history of exclusion, particularly for students with marginalized identities. This poses problems particularly when science permeates every aspect of contemporary American life. Institutions’ repeated failures to disrupt systemic oppression in STEM has led to a mostly white, cisgender, and male scientific workforce replete with implicit and/or explicit biases. Education holds one pathway to disrupt systemic linkages of STEM oppression from society to the classroom. Maintaining views on science as inherently objective isolates it from the world in which it is performed. STEM education must move beyond the transactional approaches to transformative environments manifesting respect for students’ social and educational capital. We must create a STEM environment in which students with marginalized identities feel respected, listened to, and valued. We must assist students in understanding how their positionality, privilege, and power both historically and currently impacts their meaning making and understanding of STEM.
The core of several efforts to transform STEM education center on mechanistic methodologies that center quantitative assessments as the direct measure of effective educational experiences. Additional research efforts focus on the role of equity and inclusion in STEM course environments as essential components for quantitative success. The goal of this collection is to reorient STEM researchers and practitioners to reconsider the actual purpose of the practice of teaching, and the ways in which those realities call upon practitioners to consider contemporary, evidence-based approaches; similarly, practitioners are also asked to incorporate or align current practices with the constructs of education’s psychosocial experience. In this Research Topic, we invite scholarship that questions traditional practices, through nuanced, complex yet informed realities of bringing humanism to pedagogical praxis within STEM. We see this article collection grounded in forward-thinking, proactive scholarship as openings to new conversations driving STEM education toward feasible, meaningful ways to codify equity-minded higher education course experiences.
This Research Topic welcomes contribution ranging from classroom studies to longitudinal efforts to infuse humanism in STEM pedagogical praxis. We are interested in manuscripts that promote an emphasis on interrogating systems of science, student learning, and the role humanism can play in dismantling historic methods of marginalization in STEM education. The research themes include (but are not limited to):
- Epistemological (re)considerations on the purpose of what is taught
- Belonging and/or mattering in developing a humanistic lens in STEM
- Antiracist education
- Equity in STEM
- Humanistic approaches to STEM
- High impact practices in STEM
- New methodologies to study STEM teaching and/or finding evidence of the value of humanism in STEM
The core of several efforts to transform STEM education center on mechanistic methodologies that center quantitative assessments as the direct measure of effective educational experiences. Additional research efforts focus on the role of equity and inclusion in STEM course environments as essential components for quantitative success. The goal of this collection is to reorient STEM researchers and practitioners to reconsider the actual purpose of the practice of teaching, and the ways in which those realities call upon practitioners to consider contemporary, evidence-based approaches; similarly, practitioners are also asked to incorporate or align current practices with the constructs of education’s psychosocial experience. In this Research Topic, we invite scholarship that questions traditional practices, through nuanced, complex yet informed realities of bringing humanism to pedagogical praxis within STEM. We see this article collection grounded in forward-thinking, proactive scholarship as openings to new conversations driving STEM education toward feasible, meaningful ways to codify equity-minded higher education course experiences.
This Research Topic welcomes contribution ranging from classroom studies to longitudinal efforts to infuse humanism in STEM pedagogical praxis. We are interested in manuscripts that promote an emphasis on interrogating systems of science, student learning, and the role humanism can play in dismantling historic methods of marginalization in STEM education. The research themes include (but are not limited to):
- Epistemological (re)considerations on the purpose of what is taught
- Belonging and/or mattering in developing a humanistic lens in STEM
- Antiracist education
- Equity in STEM
- Humanistic approaches to STEM
- High impact practices in STEM
- New methodologies to study STEM teaching and/or finding evidence of the value of humanism in STEM
Keywords: STEM education, humanism, critical methodology, inclusion
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
