Engineering design projects can enhance authenticity, increase relevance, and integrateSTEM subjects without compromising their individual integrity. Nevertheless, the literature also warns that few STEM subject integration projects acknowledge students’ contexts and everyday problems. This study explores how teachers prepare for STEM subject integration in an engineering design project in a Swedish upper secondary school Technology programme and examines the process and outcomes of project implementation from both teachers’ and students’ viewpoints. The design project induces students’ solutions for bettering their everyday physical school context regarding well-being, feasibility, and sustainability. Collection of data employed participatory observations, and interviews with teachers and students. Results are presented as four themes: (1) integration and collaboration can be encouraged through project organization; (2) the engineering design process is the centrepiece of the integrated project; (3) models and modelling are primarily used for communication of design ideas; and (4) integration of STEM content and methods seldomly draws on more than two disciplines. Findings show that utilizing the school’s technology profle provides an accessible pathway to promote integrated STEM. However, although several teachers demonstrate enthusiasm for the real-world relevance of design projects, integration remains challenging. Since the project was mostly viewed as being technology and engineering-based, science and mathematics were present to a lesser degree, which made integration of all STEM subjects demanding. Nevertheless, the project could be seen as responding to an “extended STEM problem” in that components from health sciences were also incorporated.

Les projets de conception technique peuvent renforcer l’authenticité, accroître la pertinence et intégrer les matières STIM sans compromettre leur intégrité individuelle. Néanmoins, la documentation existante met également en garde contre le fait que peu de projets d’intégration des matières STIM tiennent compte des contextes et des problèmes quotidiens des élèves. Cette étude s’intéresse à la manière dont les enseignants se préparent à l’intégration des matières STIM dans un projet de conception technique d’un programme de technologie applicable à la deuxième partie du secondaire dans une école suédoise et examine le processus et les résultats de la mise en œuvre du projet, du point de vue des enseignants et des élèves. Le projet de conception incite les élèves à trouver des solutions pour améliorer au quotidien le contexte physique de l’école en ce qui a trait aux enjeux de bien-être, de faisabilité et de durabilité. La collecte des données a fait appel à des observations participatives et à des entrevues avec des enseignants et des étudiants. On présente les résultats sous la forme de quatre thèmes: (1) on peut encourager l’intégration et la collaboration par l’aspect de l’organisation du projet; (2) le processus de conception technique est la pièce maîtresse du projet intégré; (3) les modèles et la modélisation sont principalement utilisés pour communiquer les idées de conception; et (4) l’intégration du contenu et des méthodes des STIM fait rarement appel à plus de deux matières. Les résultats indiquent que l’utilisation du profl technologique de l’école constitue une voie accessible pour promouvoir l’intégration des STIM. Cependant, bien que plusieurs enseignants fassent preuve d’enthousiasme en ce qui concerne la pertinence dans le monde réel des projets de conception, l’intégration reste difcile. Étant donné que le projet était principalement perçu comme fondé sur la technologie et l’ingénierie, les sciences et les mathématiques étaient moins présentes, ce qui a rendu l’intégration de toutes les matières STIM laborieuse. Néanmoins, le projet peut être vu comme une réponse à un « problème STIM étendu» dans la mesure où on a également incorporé des éléments des sciences de la santé.

The STEM acronym permeates educational research and practice. While the potential pedagogical merits of STEM as an opportunity to integrate knowledge from the contributing disciplines and achieve a holistic understanding are well-documented, little is known about how out-of-field teachers contend with contributing to such a vision in practice. With an intended audience of STEM teacher practitioners in mind, this chapter focuses on international expert views of technology (T) and engineering (E) in out-of-field teaching of integrated STEM. The presented views were solicited from experienced international researchers, education practitioners, and professionals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Experts’ views emerged as five overarching themes that primarily identified: the importance of maintaining subject integrity, the implicit nature of technology and engineering in teaching activities, the centrality of engineering design processes, the necessity of collaboration and cooperation, and the need for specialised teacher competence. The emergent views have practical implications regarding engineering design and design-based teaching for informing curriculum design, teacher education programmes, as well as STEM textbooks and resource composition. The chapter closes by illuminating the question as to whether integrated STEM remains a sought epistemological position or only a method to teach STEM subjects, a dilemma whereupon our future work with STEM experts shall continue to explore.

Teacher educators’ distinct and dual task of educating future teachers includes using digital tools to support students’ ongoing learning while exemplifying appropriate teaching strategies where the use of digital tools, such as response systems (RSs), are commonly occurring. RSs have been used in higher education for a long time, and many studies discuss how larger student groups answering multiple-choice questions during lectures contribute to student participation and learning. However, there is limited research on RSs, particularly related to teacher education. Therefore, this interview study aims to explore for what purposes teacher educators use RSs in teaching and what advantages and limitations they experience. In the thematic analysis, we found that the teacher educators used RSs to teach simultaneously as they were role models on how to use digital tools for learning. They used anonymous open-text answers more than multiple-choice questions to support student participation, immediately assess, and provide feedback in both larger and smaller groups. The complexity of time management connected to the use of RSs was highlighted. RSs were also used to initiate discussions with the teacher students about the purposes, advantages, and limitations of using digital tools for learning. 

During teacher education programs, teacher students are expected to develop the digital competence necessary for their future roles as teachers. A vital aspect of this competence involves integrating digital tools into educational activities. Some digital tools, such as response systems, are designed and used to encourage student participation during educational activities. This study explores how teacher students use different functions in various response systems during their student teaching, practically applying what they learned in an ICT course during the teacher education program. Semi-structured interviews were thematically analyzed, with activity theory as a framework to discuss the themes. The findings reveal that while most teacher students used response systems during their student teaching, the extent and manner of use varied significantly. Frequent users reported positive experiences, integrating response systems as part of their teaching strategy, while occasional and non-users faced barriers related to theoretical grounding, relevance to the subject of English, community support, and the division of labor. These results highlight the importance of aligning digital tools with educational objectives and providing teacher students with theoretical and practical support during their training. The study contributes to the ongoing discourse on integrating digital tools in teacher education and provides insights into digital competence development within teacher education programs. 

The interest in blended synchronous learning environments has increased dramati-cally since the COVID-19 pandemic. However, a key challenge is how to simulta-neously encourage online and onsite student participation. Response systems havebeen found to stimulate student participation in classroom and online education set-tings. This study investigates how online and onsite students participate in blendedsynchronous seminars where a response system is being used. The data comprisesobservations of blended synchronous seminars, students’ written reflections, andstudent interviews, all of which were thematically analyzed. It was found that usinga response system encouraged online and onsite students to participate in variousways. Although online students mostly remained quiet, they perceived to engagethrough listening and thinking, participating in the seminars by absorbing informa-tion, and interacting with the content displayed via the response system. The onsitestudents participated vocally and more spontaneously. All students participated inwritten, anonymous, and game-based modes, suggesting that there were differentand complementary ways for students to participate when using a response system,which extended beyond merely talking or chatting. Notably, most students per-ceived the response system crucial to their participation in the blended synchronousseminars. The findings underscore the importance of encouraging student participa-tion in blended synchronous learning environments, highlighting response systemsas effective tools to encourage onsite and, particularly, online student participation.

Contemporary secondary technology education often does not mirror engineering practice. Whilethere is much rhetoric on the need for promoting active, authentic, and real-world professionalexperiences in upper secondary school, most technology education teaching remains traditional,and teacher centered. This study investigates the affordances for authenticity of role-play-basedproject work in a Swedish upper secondary software engineering course. The project requiredstudents (aged 17–18) to assume the role of software engineer employees at a web-designbusiness with the task of creating a website for a gaming company, where the course instructorassumed the role of the web business owner. The six-week project included the formulation of adesign plan, back-end programming, developing and refining the design and layout, adjustingcontent for accessibility, and publication of the web site. Inductive analysis of observations fromthe unfolding role-play in five student groups (total 22 students), and interviews with fourstudents and the teacher exposed salient themes related to authenticity of the role-play-basedproject exposed within teacher-student interactions and student intragroup interactions. Teacherstudent interactions revealed that the teacher exhibited various roles in the project, initially actingas a customer but also the responsibilities of a boss and a teacher-mentor. In the latter instance,students perceived the project as more school-oriented than authentic, expressing a preference foran external customer, and at the same time, the teacher tried to align the task with the project’scurriculum requirements. Student intragroup interactions showed that despite highly varied roles,students felt that their assigned roles enhanced the authenticity of their experience, although theywere unaware of what a real scenario might entail. Successful students emphasized theimportance of structured work and clear responsibilities to meet the project goal. The findingsshow that while role-playing is not necessarily always equivalent to reality, it was viewed as afulfilling and situated learning experience that simulated a real-world scenario, but which reliedon mutual confidence and responsibility between the role-players. Future work will combine thefindings with existing frameworks of authenticity to inform the development of role-playscenarios in upper secondary engineering education. 

Contemporary secondary technology education often does not mirror engineering practice. While there is much rhetoric on the need for promoting active, authentic, and real-world professional experiences in upper secondary school, most technology education teaching remains traditional, and teacher centered. This study investigates the affordances for authenticity of role-play-based project work in a Swedish upper secondary software engineering course. The project required students (aged 17-18) to assume the role of software engineer employees at a web-design business with the task of creating a website for a gaming company, where the course instructor assumed the role of the web business owner. The six-week project included the formulation of a design plan, back-end programming, developing and refining the design and layout, adjusting content for accessibility, and publication of the web site. Inductive analysis of observations from the unfolding role-play in five student groups (total 22 students), and interviews with four students and the teacher exposed salient themes related to authenticity of the role-play-based project exposed within teacher-student interactions and student intragroup interactions. Teacher-student interactions revealed that the teacher exhibited various roles in the project, initially acting as a customer but also the responsibilities of a boss and a teacher-mentor. In the latter instance, students perceived the project as more school-oriented than authentic, expressing a preference for an external customer, and at the same time, the teacher tried to align the task with the project's curriculum requirements. Student intragroup interactions showed that despite highly varied roles, students felt that their assigned roles enhanced the authenticity of their experience, although they were unaware of what a real scenario might entail. Successful students emphasized the importance of structured work and clear responsibilities to meet the project goal. The findings show that while role-playing is not necessarily always equivalent to reality, it was viewed as a fulfilling and situated learning experience that simulated a real-world scenario, but which relied on mutual confidence and responsibility between the role-players. Future work will combine the findings with existing frameworks of authenticity to inform the development of role-play scenarios in upper secondary engineering education.

Ordet modell är ett samlingsnamn för förenklade representationer av exempelvis produkter eller tekniska principer. Vissa modeller används för att visa utseendet hos en produkt, andra för att beräkna hållfasthet eller fastställa elektriska egenskaper, åter andra för att dokumentera en konstruktionsidé eller visa hur en funktion åstadkoms. Modeller kan vara av olika slag beroende på vad de ska användas till, exempelvis fysiska föremål, matematiska formler eller blockscheman.

Tekniklärare använder modeller bland annat för att visa hur tekniska artefakter ser ut och system fungerar. Elever använder modeller för att få kännedom om tekniska lösningar, men också för att dokumentera och pröva idéer under teknikutvecklingsarbetet.

Modeller och modellering nämns i teknikämnets kurs- och ämnesplaner från lågstadiet till och med gymnasiet. På lågstadiet dominerar enkla bilder och fysiska modeller. Med åren blir modellerna mer abstrakta och mer komplexa. På gymnasiet bygger de ofta på matematiska och naturvetenskapliga kunskaper.

What pupils learn in school should ideally be useful throughout their whole lives. It should help them in further studies, in working life, and when acting as responsible citizens in democratic society. This is challenging for all subjects, including technology. Technology develops fast. It is most likely that wheels, wedges, and inclined planes will be used in the future, but it is difficult to know which programming languages, sources of energy, and materials that will be relevant a few decades from now. This article describes how these problems are handled in international curricula and standards, and by Swedish teachers, teacher students, and teacher educators. In curricula they are seldom addressed explicitly, but handled by giving deliberately vague descriptions of what students are to learn. The interviewed teachers, teacher educators, and teacher students were unused to think about future-compliant or timeless knowledge. When prompted to do so during the interviews, they found it easier to describe timeless skills than timeless factual knowledge. Prominent among their suggestions were abilities related to engineering design processes, technical problem solving strategies, fundamentals of computer programming, and engineering mechanics.

What pupils learn in school should ideally be useful throughout their whole lives. It should help them in further studies, in working life, and when acting as responsible citizens in democratic society. This is challenging for all subjects, including technology. Technology develops fast. It is most likely that wheels, wedges, and inclined planes will be used in the future, but it is difficult to know which programming languages, sources of energy, and materials that will be relevant a few decades from now. This article describe how these problems are handled in international curricula and standards, and by Swedish teachers, teacher students, and teacher educators. In curricula they are seldom addressed explicitly, but handled by giving deliberately vague descriptions of what students are to learn. The interviewed teachers, teacher educators, and teacher students were unused to think about future-compliant or timeless knowledge. When prompted to do so during the interviews, they found it easier to describe timeless skills than timeless factual knowledge. Prominent among their suggestions were abilities related to engineering design processes, technical problem solving strategies, fundamentals of computer programming, and engineering mechanics.