Abstract
There is an increased interest to integrate STEAM methodologies and digital fabrication processes into formal education. However, teachers have repeatedly reported a set of impediments that hampers them to succeed. This integration requires a set of changes in the school organization, resourcing and a proper teacher training. A Community of Practice formed by different stakeholders of a local educational community might provide the necessary grounds to lead to this transition. In this paper, we report our experience of creating and scaffolding a local Community of Practice for a period of ten months. We present the different activities we carried out during this period, emphasizing a digital fabrication training that we conducted, at our university Fab Lab premises, for teachers and school principals separately. We also explore the influence of this training on scaffolding of the development of the Community of Practice. We expect the training structure, discussion and insights presented in this paper would inspire other researchers and practitioners trying to bring digital fabrication to formal education.
Highlights
STEAM is a broad concept that aims to bring together education in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math in an integrative way, bringing together the technological design methodologies typical of engineering and technology fields with the enquiry learning approach used in Maths and Science [1] and the divergent thinking style coming from Arts [2]
In the context of this paper, we explore the idea of the community from the perspective of Community of Practice (CoP), a concept first defined by Lave and Wenger [38] and further developed by Wenger [25]
In March, we presented the community with initial results in a workshop that was held at the biggest national education technology conference in Finland
Summary
STEAM is a broad concept that aims to bring together education in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math in an integrative way, bringing together the technological design methodologies typical of engineering and technology fields with the enquiry learning approach used in Maths and Science [1] and the divergent thinking style coming from Arts [2]. STEAM practices support switching from traditional lecture-based teaching to inquiry and project-based strategies that promote other social skills such as collaborative learning. Pupils are educated as future citizens that approach problem solving through innovation, creativity, critical thinking, effective communication, collaboration and, new knowledge [3]. The new curriculum encourages schools to seek new ways of learning and teaching. New Curriculum goals and methodologies fitted very well with those in STEAM, and a rise in the usage of STEAM pedagogies in Finnish schools was expected
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