This guide was created as a collection of tips and tricks for creating and upgrading STEM lessons, curriculums and learning experiences to be more engaging, playful, creative and transformative. This guide is meant for teachers and students. If you’re like us, you’re both!
This material has been informed by many sources and is co-created through the knowledge of many collaborators and experiences. We did our best to cite these inspirations and sources along the way. This guide is a living, breathing resource that keeps evolving. We are going to update it as we go. In this vein, please feel free to write to us and tag where we might have missed something!
We’ve created this toolkit because STEM education needs an upgrade. We love science, but we also are quite aware of its history of exploitation and exclusion. This is part of a journey of exploring how we can begin to evolve our philosophy and pedagogy of teaching science.
How to use this/any open-access toolkit/guide in a non-extractive way?
On using this syllabus/curriculum/list – The toolkit for engaging STEM is, following the philosophy of The Processing Foundation, an open-access resource, but we would like to invite you to be mindful about referring to where you got this knowledge from. As part of this project, we have begun to trace the sources of our knowledge to honor where and how we’ve learned. As stated above, here, we are experimenting with different ways of referring to our sources, the people and places we learned from. In this vein, we would like to invite you to honor your sources and find creative ways to point to them (beyond the merely academic way of citing). When you learn something from this tool, think about how to make known how you come to know. With using this comes the idea that you incorporate the practices/values into your own practice: referring to the ones where you got knowledge from, tracing them back, naming them, honoring them.
