STEM—Beyond the Acronym

Everywhere you turn, STEMmania has set in. Most educators are familiar with the acronym, but many have questions: Why is STEM education important? Is it for all students, or just for math- and science-oriented students? Can it improve my teaching? Is this just one more add-on to my already packed curriculum?

Everything Has a Beginning

The concept of STEM—for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—was introduced in the 1990s by the National Science Foundation. Not long after its introduction, we Americans learned that The World Is Flat (Friedman, 2005) and that our students were going to be left behind in the globally competitive marketplace because many other countries were out-STEMming us. Government and private funding began to flow toward all different types of STEM education programs, and today STEM has come to be recognized as a meta-discipline—an integration of formerly separate subjects into a new and coherent field of study.