Students Opportunities to Learn: Exploring Junior Secondary Teachers’ Enactments of STEM Integration

While STEM integration has garnered significant attention in educational research, studies on its enactments in regular school settings remain limited. Based on the two-dimensional spectral framework: disciplinarity and pedagogy, our previous study identified three types of STEM projects in Taiwanese junior secondary schools. Drawing on the lens of students’ opportunities to learn, this study further scrutinized how two prevalent types of STEM projects, s-t-E-m/Teacher-planned and STEM/Teacher-guided projects, were enacted within existing school curricula. Three aspects of teachers’ enactments—epistemic practices of engineering design, disciplinary integration, and instructional approaches—were adopted to examine the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of STEM project enactments. Data included videotaping of the STEM lessons and teacher interviews. The findings showed that the two project enactments manifested distinct engineering project components; one features the design-build-test and the other highlights the preliminary innovation. They each involved various sets of epistemic practices of engineering, integrated varied disciplinary knowledge and adopted assorted instructional approaches, providing rich design thinking and practice opportunities. Notably, the how aspect affects the level of student participation, and the same epistemic practice of engineering may offer different learning opportunities across the same or different projects due to variations in knowledge or instructional approaches. The study demonstrated that the three aspects of enactments proposed in the study provided a fresh lens to characterize STEM integration projects. This new perspective shifts focus to the essential task of re-evaluating the goals of STEM integration and helps clarify the key disciplinary knowledge and effective approaches needed to achieve the desired outcomes.