CESA STEM Project
- Mr Bruce White,
- Dr Lisa O’Keeffe,
- Dr Yvonne Zeegers,
- Associate Professor Simon Leonard
- Dr Kathy Paige
The CESA STEM project is a collaboration between UniSA and Catholic Education South Australia (CESA), to examine and develop contemporary pedagogies in STEM in the critical year from 6-9. Catholic Education South Australia (CESA), has a STEM initiative aimed at increasing engagement in the learning of science, technology, engineering and mathematics by creating opportunities which build leadership and teacher capability to transform STEM learning that privileges and integrates a Catholic pedagogy. While CESA personnel provide a diversity of professional learning for primary and secondary teachers to access, limited research has been undertaken to assess its impact. This is particularly true for females and Indigenous students in schools that are in low socioeconomic areas. As part of this project, CESA project schools will implement STEM based projects. This will involve some professional learning on facilitating and assessing inquiry-based projects & the teaching of discipline knowledge through inquiry-based project. The focus of the research will be pedagogical change through STEM inquiry-based projects. This research project will be implemented in conjunction with Catholic Education South Australia over three years (2018-2020). The first two years involves working with teachers and students in schools to implement pedagogical change in STEM teaching and learning and to research the effect of these changes. The third year has a focus on data collection, in order to identify sustainability of the changes implemented.
