HomeOld_PostsDemystifying STEM: Part One ...creating scientific literacy for development

Demystifying STEM: Part One …creating scientific literacy for development

Published on

IN a previous article, I promised readers I would do a series of articles to demystify STEM.
STEM is an abbreviation for four areas of knowledge.
The ‘S’ stands for Science, ‘T’ for Technology, ‘E’ for Engineering and ‘M’ for Mathematics.
In the colonial educational curriculum, Africans were deprived of opportunities to learn science, mathematics, technology and engineering.
These subject areas represented the productive sciences.
The skills and knowledge to measure and quantify our materials and resources, to manufacture goods, set up and operate labour-saving devices (machines), process various materials into marketable goods all depended on a good science education.
So we need to understand that the deliberate exclusion of Africans from science subjects at school and in the workplace was part of the racial discrimination to ensure that the blackman did not compete with the whiteman economically.
So the apparent unpopularity of STEM subjects among African parents, teachers and pupils is not because they are difficult to learn!
It is the product of a deliberate diabolical colonial policy to marginalise Africans economically.
Over time, it has become accepted that science subjects are ‘difficult’ to learn. The girl-child has been further disadvantaged by the perpetuation of a false belief that girls are by nature poor at science.
So we have to fight two myths: that STEM subjects are difficult and that girls have limited capacity to learn science.
The shortage of STEM subject teachers in our schools is a direct result of low numbers of students taking up science all the way to college.
To exorcise the ghost of ‘difficult science and mathematics’, we have to cure student teachers and their college lecturers first.
There has to be a deliberate programme to demystify science and mathematics while revolutionising the teaching approaches to these subjects.
When I first went to secondary school at Chegato High in Mberengwa, we learnt from teachers and other students that ‘mathematics was a failing subject’.
So we were psychologically conditioned to accept failure in mathematics. Science was also an exotic subject and somewhat mysterious.
It was something you learnt in a special room called a laboratory.
One got the feeling that passing science was a matter of chance.
I am capturing my real life experiences with STEM back in the 1960s.
I am sure each reader can recall his/her own experiences with the ‘new’ subjects, science and mathematics.
We had done Arithmetic which we later learnt was part of mathematics.
I have made reference to new approaches to teaching these subjects, starting with training the teachers.
We struggled with our ‘failing subject’ Mathematics for the best part of Form One.
Our teacher, we later learnt, was not a mathematician, but an Arts major drafted to fill in the gap.
Things took a dramatic turn when the missionaries recruited a young Lutheran mathematics teacher from Minnesota in the US.
I still remember him saying in his American accent: “Math, students, is an easy subject, you just watch.”
Indeed we watched, and within weeks, he had turned a ‘failing subject’ into one where each of us expected to get a distinction pass at Junior Certificate Level.
It was a dramatic turn of events.
He was a good mathematics teacher and showed us all the tricks and shortcuts of working mathematical problems.
When the Junior Certificate results of the Class of 1968 came out, Mathematics, we learnt, had the highest number of distinctions.
We did not hear of any failures.
Such was the impact of a good trained teacher.
After completing my Ordinary Level education, I chose deliberately to train as a Science teacher at Gwelo (Gweru) Teachers College.
I had friends who also trained as Mathematics teachers.
After graduation and deployment into various schools, we used to communicate and compare the Science and Mathematics results of our pupils.
Pass rates from trained teachers were very high, with the competition being based on the number of one’s pupils with distinction passes.
Of course, the pupils were also the best selected since secondary schools were few, but the positive impact of trained teachers was still obvious.
I have made reference to my experiences both as a pupil and a science teacher to illustrate the possible sources of failure and success in promoting STEM subjects.
Fortunately, both education ministries are fully seized with addressing these issues.
In this series of articles, we shall concentrate on demystifying the various STEM subjects.
It is important we remove the fear of science and mathematics from the minds of ordinary Zimbabweans, most of whom have few fond memories of these school subjects.
In an earlier article, we explained that science is knowledge gathered in a systematic way so as to remove bias.
The systematic way is called the scientific method.
Any competent individual investigating a given object or phenomenon must come to the same conclusions as other independent investigators.
The conclusions or observations are then accepted as scientific facts.
They do not change depending on who carries out the study.
This means we can make decisions based on these facts.
Today we hear that Government wants to make evidence-based decisions, not guesswork.
Science-based knowledge is therefore critical for decision-making.
Let us look at how science, technology, engineering and mathematics are linked.
If one orders a gate to be made by a blacksmith, the latter must measure accurately the width and height so that the gate fits perfectly.
Otherwise the customer will reject the gate and refuse to pay.
Materials will be wasted and the blacksmith will be all the poorer.
The ability to measure accurately, cut to size and weld together the pieces in the correct order involves skills in mathematics and engineering.
The tools used and the welding processes also represent different technologies being applied. Technology, put simply, is scientific ideas that are turned into tools and put to work to solve a problem.
Let us take a remote control unit as an example of technology.
The device produces radiation waves which travel through space.
These waves can be used to cause the television to be switched on by a person at a distance. That is technology.
The knowledge about the waves and how they cause the switch to turn on are the science.
Engineering is the way to put all the various parts together in such a way that the remote control works.
So, an engineer must understand the science, but his skill is to build and arrange the different parts so the remote control works.
We need to understand that in fact, all our development must be led by STEM. Production, processing, packaging and utilisation of various goods require a good understanding of science, technology and engineering.
We need STEM to develop goods and services that we can export to bring foreign currency into Zimbabwe.
Otherwise we will lose millions of dollars as we import goods that other countries using STEM manufacture and sell to us.
So we study science in order to better understand the things around us, our God-given natural resources and how we can use them to make goods and services that we can market, export and earn foreign currency for our economy. So we can see that we need to study STEM subjects.
We need Biology to understand how our bodies and other living things work; Chemistry to understand all the substances and how they behave; Physics to understand how matter and energy interact and so many other ‘sciences’.
In the next article we look at more examples of how STEM is central to our economic development.
We shall see why STEM is not separated from all other subjects in our school curriculum.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Latest articles

Kariba Municipality commits to President’s service delivery blueprint

By Kundai Marunya IT is rare to find opposition-controlled urban councils throwing their weight on...

The resurgence of Theileriosis in 2024 

THE issues of global changes, climate change and tick-borne diseases cannot be ignored, given...

Britain haunted by its hostile policy on Zimbabwe

TWO critical lessons drawn from the recent debate on Zimbabwe in the British House...

The contentious issue of race

 By Nthungo YaAfrika AS much as Africans would want to have closure to many of...

More like this

Kariba Municipality commits to President’s service delivery blueprint

By Kundai Marunya IT is rare to find opposition-controlled urban councils throwing their weight on...

The resurgence of Theileriosis in 2024 

THE issues of global changes, climate change and tick-borne diseases cannot be ignored, given...

Britain haunted by its hostile policy on Zimbabwe

TWO critical lessons drawn from the recent debate on Zimbabwe in the British House...

Discover more from Celebrating Being Zimbabwean

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading