Chapter 3: Integrated Stem: Interdisciplinary Teams and Proposed Framework for Preservice Teacher Utilization

For several decades, education reformers have been advocating expanding traditional views teaching science and mathematics as isolated content areas to instead pursuing a wider domain of STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in integrated STEM. In more recent years, there has been a greater push to integrate engineering and computer science concepts across these domains. This change represents a challenge for future teacher preparation faculty because future teacher undergraduates are largely taught their STEM conceptual foundations in disconnected, disciplinary departments—physics in the physics department, math in the mathematics department, chemistry in the chemistry department, engineering in the engineering college, and so on. This chapter offers an overview of integrated STEM, an integrated approach to teaching the STEM disciplines, insights into interdisciplinary teams with their importance, and a close look at partnership interactions with an eye toward improving the preparation of future teachers. If the reader is interested, the chapter authors have published other works related to topics included here such as Kilty and Burrows (2022).