Finding The T and E In STEAM: A lesson taught and learned

Abstract

We have seen students struggling with understanding and defining technology during years of educating pre-service teachers. This study describes lessons with pre-service technology teachers as we try, for us, a new way of scaffolding their understandings. By teaching technology through STEAM, we aimed to get our students thinking about technology and exploring what technology is for them. We chose aesthetic learning processes as a tool to reach this aim. The concept of aesthetic learning processes has been developed within Scandinavian educational research and is often used in our specific teaching environment within higher education. Students were introduced to the stop-motion movie technique and asked to express what technology meant to them. We analysed the student's movies through inductive analysis. Even though it was the aim of the students' task, we discovered that little technology content knowledge did transfer to the stop motion movies. On the other hand, from an aesthetic perspective, they were great. The movie gave us something to consider as teachers. It taught us what could be made better when trying to understand technology this way. We learned that in a STEAM setting, we lost the T and E and discuss the implications of interdisciplinary teaching.