Paper Session 12.2

The University of Sydney

Friday 25 November 2022. 12:30pm - 1:00pm

Christine Preston

STEM in my kindergarten class

Contact Author: Christine Preston (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

BACKGROUND AND AIMS

Amidst calls for STEM education to formally commence from the first year of school, after being introduced in preschool, early years teachers require role models and exemplars to support its implementation and achieve educational benefits. Engaging kindergarten students in authentic integrated STEM inquiry learning requires real-world situations to foster their interest, develop practical skills, and promote inherent thinking. Effective STEM teaching practices (e.g., engineering design, digital literacy, etc.) take time and pedagogical expertise to develop. Like enacting the design process, iterations of lesson design, implementation and redesign can result in high quality STEM learning experiences. Teachers’ development of STEM literacy and building of practical knowledge for STEM teaching, essential for teacher education / professional development (Hsu & Fang, 2019), can be supported by reflection on classroom-based exemplars. The purpose of this presentation is to share insights of STEM teaching practices and student learning derived from practitioner/researcher studies conducted with kindergarten (5-year-olds) in an Australian primary school.

TIME ZONES: The conference program is spread over four half-days (8am to 1pm). All the times in the program will be in Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT), which is the time zone of Sydney, NSW, in the summer. AEDT is 11 hours ahead of the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) ie. GMT+11. A time converter can be used to calculate your local time for the duration of the conference. We recommend you consult a time converter to confirm the exact time of presentations you wish to view.

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