Transdisciplinary education to meet Earth system challenges: development
of the Egyptian STEM school and teacher education curricula
Abstract
Following the establishment of the first STEM school in Egypt (in 2011),
the Egyptian Ministry of Education and the USAID-funded Egypt’s STEM
School Project began joint work creating a public STEM high school
model, supported by US STEM education experts, that addresses 11 major
Grand Challenges (GCs) identified by Egyptians. In 2018, the Egyptian
Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research and US STEM
faculty, coordinated by 21PSTEM, began creating 4-year undergraduate and
1-year post-Bachelor programs to prepare teachers for these schools,
under the USAID-funded STEM Teacher Education and School Strengthening
Activity (STESSA), also based on the GCs. Traditional Earth science
alone was not sufficient to prepare students to meet these
transdisciplinary GCs. Instead, the STEM high schools, as well as the
graduate and undergraduate programs, use a transdisciplinary curriculum,
with biology, chemistry, physics, Earth science, and math taught every
semester. The content is further integrated every semester in capstone
project experiences. These curricula were jointly developed by US and
Egyptian STEM content experts who also did teacher training. These STEM
schools have been a major success, catapulting Egyptian youth into wins
at international STEM competitions and earning them admission to elite
universities around the world. As the schools developed, the Ministry of
Education and 21PSTEM (which implements STESSA) found that US-Egyptian
professional development helped ease teachers’ transition to the
integrated curriculum. But a growing number of STEM high schools made a
new teacher pipeline imperative. US and Egyptian faculty are developing
new 4-year undergraduate programs to prepare teachers in 5 STEM
disciplines. These programs echo the high school curriculum and the GCs,
but are more explicitly transdisciplinary, beginning with 6 integrated
STEM courses in the first two years. Earth science plays a prominent
role in these integrated courses and Earth science faculty from the US
and Egypt have played a significant role in course development. We will
report on the development and progress of the first two of these
transdisciplinary courses, and the potential of truly transdisciplinary
course work to develop stronger Earth scientists, ready to meet grand
challenges in any nation on Earth.