Entanglement of the United States and Turkish Science and Mathematics Educators Through the Lens of Becomings: Conceptualizing STEM Education Using a Bakhtinian Dialogic Approach

Abstract

Around the world, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education and its variants (i.e., STEAM, STREAM) are at the forefront of educational conversations. At the heart of these conversations are questions of how to prepare future generations of scientists, STEM teachers, and citizen scientists in response to rapid economic and social challenges. In this chapter, the authors, serving as both instructors and researchers of STEM education in different education contexts in the U.S. and Turkey examine different STEM teacher preparation programs. Considering the broader international context, the authors engaged in dialogues and reflected on the need to prepare future STEM teachers to face wicked problems (Carter, Gathering in threads in the insensible global world: The wicked problem of globalization and science education. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 6(1), 1–12, 2011) in STEM education. These challenges are both localized and global where actors are entangled with other actors who are always and already in the milieu or “middle” (Deleuze & Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 1987) of becoming Homo sapiens textilis, the human that knows it is interwoven (Jeong et al., The Anthropocene as we know it: Posthumanism, science education and scientific literacy as a path to sustainability. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 16(3), 805–820, 2021). Facing these challenges, we as STEM educators offer recommendations to not only educate future generations of STEM teachers and K-12 students in interdisciplinary way of thinking, but also thoughtfully consider what STEM education could become.