A Critical Examination of STEM
Issues and Challenges
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Book Description
This critical examination of STEM discourses highlights the imperative to think about educational reforms within the diverse cultural contexts of ongoing environmental and technologically driven changes. Chet Bowers illuminates how the dominant myths of Western science promote false promises of what science can achieve. Examples demonstrate how the various science disciplines and their shared ideology largely fail to address the ways metaphorically layered language influences taken-for-granted patterns of thinking and the role this plays in colonizing other cultures, thus maintaining the myth that scientific inquiry is objective and free of cultural influences. Guidelines and questions are included to engage STEM students in becoming explicitly aware of these issues and the challenges they pose.
Table of Contents
Contents:
Preface
Chapter 1 The Cultural Baggage Most Scientists Take For Granted
Chapter 2 Avoiding the Separation of Science and Culture
Chapter 3 An Overview of What Scientists Need to Know About the Cultures They are Transforming
Chapter 4 The Cultural Mediating Nature of Technique and Technologies: Another Area of Silence in the Education of Western Scientists
Chapter 5 Educating the Next and Perhaps Last Generation of Scientists and Technologists
Chapter 6 How an Uncritical Reliance upon Print and Data
Misrepresents the Emergent, Relational, and Interdependent World of All Ecologies
Chapter 7 Helping STEM Students Recognize the Political Categories that Support an Ecologically Sustainable Future
Chapter 8 How STEM Teachers can Address the Fear and Ecological Uncertainties by Introducing Students to the Differences Between Wisdom and Data
Chapter 9 Helping to Protect Students from the Excesses of Scientism in Today’s World
Chapter 10 Rethinking Social Justice Issues Within an Eco-Justice Conceptual and Moral Framework
References
Author(s)
Biography
Chet Bowers has taught at the University of Oregon and Portland State University, and was granted emeritus status in 1998. He has also written 20 books on the cultural and linguistic roots of the ecological crisis and four books on the cultural transforming nature of the digital revolution.