Abstract:

This paper reports on a school-university partnership program that explicitly addresses and seeks to dis-articulate the persistent “income-outcome” pattern to which we have become inured, seeking to work with its local school district to support teachers in transitioning from that humanities-based, print-literacy-driven paradigm that has defined modernist education, to the STEM-focused, digital literacies supported paradigm that is its “post-modern” successor. Its primary challenge is to see whether those very technologies that have effected and fully entrenched this 21C educational 'paradigm shift', might also afford a powerful opportunity to intervene in dismantling entrenched structures of educational inequality and in rebuilding parts of the public system that have become irretrievably out-dated and perilously ineffective. Leveraging the expertise and resources of one university’s technology-rich, STEM-focused Faculty of Education, in collaboration with its local school district, this 3 year federally project seeks (i) To build, implement and evaluate an effective model for a school improvementprogram that increases teachers' capacity, experience and specific fluency and expertise with technologies supporting STEM learning and digital literacies; and (ii) To utilize this faculty’s extensive experience with online educational engagement to extend access to system-wide teacher up-skilling, particularly for schools distant from a physically accessible university to support teachers in the paradigm shift from traditional to digital literacies and from humanities based to STEM-focused education. We report in this panel specifically on the forms that resistance to change has taken in the course of building this partnership, as well as potential strategies and tactical ‘work-arounds’ that collaborative educational change so very typically demands.

Keywords:

21st Century Education, STEM learning, digital literacies.