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Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical
Review
Miwa A. Takeuchi
Educational Studies in Learning Sciences
University of Calgary - Werklund School of Education
Email: miwa.takeuchi@ucalgary.ca
Pratim Sengupta
Educational Studies in Learning Sciences
University of Calgary - Werklund School of Education
Email: pratim.sengupta@ucalgary.ca
Marie-Claire Shanahan
Educational Studies in Learning Sciences
University of Calgary - Werklund School of Education
Email: mcshanah@ucalgary.ca
Jennifer D. Adams
Educational Studies in Learning Sciences
University of Calgary - Werklund School of Education
Email: jennifer.adams1@ucalgary.ca
Maryam Hachem
Educational Studies in Learning Sciences
University of Calgary - Werklund School of Education
Email: myhachem@ucalgary.ca
Citation:
Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in press).
Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Acknowledgement
We acknowledge Venise Bryan and Donghyun Seo for their technical help with coding. This project
was funded by a grant from the Office of Research at the Werklund School of Education, University
of Calgary and the US National Science Foundation (NSF-DRL 1842358). All opinions expressed
are the authors’ and not endorsed by the funding agencies.
1
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 2)
Abstract
Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education garnered significant at-
tention in recent years and has emerged as a key field of research globally. The goal of this article
is to offer a critical review of how STEM education and its transdisciplinarity were defined and/or
positioned in empirical studies published during the early formulation of the field. In particular,
we sought to identify how these studies conceptualize learners and learning and portray the
underlying assumptions in light of the macrosystemic discourses that often serve as ideological
forces in shaping research and practice of STEM education. We examined 154 peer-reviewed
articles published between January 2007 and March 2018 and analysed them along several emer-
gent dimensions: their geo-spatial focus, focal disciplinary areas, methodological and theoretical
assumptions, and major findings. Grounded in a critical transdisciplinary perspective, we used
critical discourse analysis to identify how macrosystemic and institutionalized forces — overtly
and implicitly — shape what counts as STEM education research, including its goals and con-
ceptualizations of learners and learning. Our analysis highlights the need for aesthetic expansion
and diversification of STEM education research by challenging the disciplinary hegemonies and
calls for reorienting the focus away from human capital discourse.
Keywords: STEM education; critical theory; transdisciplinarity; discourse analysis
Introduction
In recent years, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education has gar-
nered greater attention in the field of educational research. As reviewed in this article, the
number of peer-reviewed publications in English on STEM education grew significantly since
2007. There are also a growing number of books in STEM education research published globally
(e.g., Chesky & Wolfmeyer, 2015; Khine, 2018; Langman & Hansen-Thomas, 2017). The mean-
ing and images of STEM education are not monolithic, especially in the context of research and
educational practices. Historically, the notion of STEM education has been largely influenced by
policies and discourses in the United States (Shanahan, Burke,& Francis, 2016). In the United
States, STEM education was emphasized in response to the rising threat for national security
during the Sputnik era (Bybee, 2010). In the post-Sputnik area, the discourse around STEM
education turned more inward. With the publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission
on Excellence in Education, 1983) the emphasis turned to filling workforce demands in the glob-
alized and dynamically changing market (as represented in Committee on Science, Engineering
and Public Policy, 2007).
Globally, STEM education has become intimately associated with its utilitarian and instru-
mentalist values for economic growth and productivity. The integration of STEM disciplines is
identified with “innovation” in scientific, technical and mathematical disciplines. Governmental
efforts are well underway in countries around the world to provide institutional support for “in-
novation” in disciplinary learning at the K-12 levels for example, in China (Li & Chiang, 2019),
India (Sharma & Yarlagadda, 2018), Malaysia (Thomas & Waters, 2015), Australia (Sharma
& Yarlagadda, 2018), England (Wong, Dillon, & King, 2016), and Canada (e.g., Committee on
Science, Engineering and Public Policy, 2007; Council of Canadian Academies, 2015; Shanahan
et al., 2016; Science Technology and Innovation Council, 2009, 2015).
There is now a growing attention to critical analyses of the impact of macrosystemic dis-
courses (including neoliberal policies and economic incentives) on STEM education that in turn
narrow the scope and meaning of science and science education policy and curriculum (e.g.,
Carter, 2017; Hoeg & Bencze, 2017a; Vossoughi & Vakil, 2018; Wong et al., 2016). A macrosys-
tem refers to “general prototypes, existing in the culture or subculture, that set the pattern for
the structures and activities occurring at the concrete level” (Bronfenbrenner, 1977, p. 515).
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 3)
Entrepreneurship and innovation are examples of such macrosystems that have directly shaped
practices in technoscientific fields of practice (e.g., technology design) as well as public education.
For example, Irani (2019) points out that the push for entrepreneurial approaches to design can
lead to the positioning of the work of design (including technology design) as entrepreneurial
citizenship that is largely market-driven and consumer oriented. This creates a specific kind of
framing of social issues, encouraging people to “translate the injustice around them into pro-
grams, products, and services which the private sector could address” (Irani, 2019, p. 216–217),
which in turn reframes the members of the public affected by injustice as consumers. This trans-
lation creates a pattern of outwardly appearing to solve problems while leaving the sources of
those problems untouched. The same macrosystemic forces are in play in the context of public
education (Giroux, 2008) which then positions the innovative learner as an entrepreneur and a
generator of capital, hidden in the guise of disciplinary authenticity. In the contexts of com-
puting and STEM education, as Sengupta, Dickes, and Farris (in press) argue, such views of
learning also tend to rely on technological determinism that foregrounds computational artifacts
rather than the inherent heterogeneity of learning experiences (Rosebery, Ogonowski, DiSchino,
& Warren, 2010).
Given this backdrop, we examine how contemporary studies of STEM education conceptualize
learners and learning and portray the underlying assumptions in light of the macrosystemic
discourses that often serve as ideological forces in shaping research and practice at the K-16 levels.
Our conceptualization is necessarily political, because the origin and use of the term STEM has
been shaped by government policies and initiatives (Shanahan, et al., 2016). It is in this sense
that our review distinguishes itself from existing literature reviews on STEM education (e.g.,
Belland, Walker, Kim, & Lefler, 2017; Kim, Sinatra, & Seyranian, 2018; Reinhold, Holzberger,
& Seidel, 2018). In contrast to these reviews, we explicitly attend to questions such as who the
learners are, how they are positioned in relationship to STEM, and for whom STEM education
(research and practice) is oriented (Philip, Bang, & Jackson, 2018).
We present a review of 154 articles published in 22 English-medium international journals,
between January 2007 and March 2018. Our goal was to focus on an early period of STEM
education research especially after publication of the report of the US Committee on Science,
Engineering and Public Policy (2007), which has played a significant role in setting funding
and research initiatives in STEM education. In the period between January 2007 and March
2018, the number of publications showed a significant growth, particularly after 2011 when the
number of publications on STEM education exceeded 100 per year. This gave us a substantial
corpus of data to select from. Our decision to limit the analysis till 2018 is also based on another
interesting turn in the field, because since 2019, there has been an amplification of efforts focused
on critical theoretical perspectives in STEM education. This includes special issues in journals by
McKinney de Royston and Sengupta-Irving (Cognition and Instruction, 2019), Vakil and Ayers
(Race, Ethnicity and Education, 2019) and an edited volume by Sengupta, Shanahan, and Kim
(Critical, Transdisciplinary and Embodied Approaches in STEM Education, 2019). Noticeable
across these more recent efforts is an explicit attention to political and socio-ecological issues
that shape STEM education, in addition to focusing on learners who have been historically
marginalized. We therefore assumed that limiting our review to the period between January
2007 and March 2018 would provide an overview of STEM education research in the decade of
its early formulation. It also offers us an opportunity to examine how macrosystemic discourses
that have shaped policy decisions have influenced scholarship on STEM education during this
period, especially when researchers did not explicitly critique these discourses.
In what follows, we first engage in definitional issues around key constructs: integrated STEM
education and transdisciplinarity. We then describe how we conducted our literature search and
review, both from the perspective of providing an overview of research trends as well as from
the methodological perspective of critical discourse analysis. In our findings, we first provide an
overview of the current research literature to depict the meaning and image inscribed onto STEM
education. Subsequently, by revealing underlying assumptions behind the current research lit-
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 4)
erature on STEM education, we depict how macrosystemic and institutionalized discourses are
impacting the ways in which current research construes and constructs the images of learners and
learning in the sphere of STEM education. We conclude our article by discussing the potentially
expansive possibilities of transdisciplinarity, as we envisage spatial and disciplinary expansions
and reorientation of the currently dominant discourses on human capital in STEM education
research.
Definitional Issues in STEM Education
STEM “Integration”: Practice, “Real-World” and Boundary Objects
There have been several initiatives by researchers and policy makers seeking reform in public
education that have attempted to define STEM education, which makes creating a precise def-
inition of Integrated STEM Education challenging (Wong et al., 2016). However, across the
different definitions we reviewed in the literature, connection between STEM disciplines stood
out as a common goal for STEM integration, as well as the emphasis on “real-world” contexts
in bringing about such integration.
For example, in a well-cited national report in the US, Honey, Pearson, and Schweingruber
(2014) argued that teaching STEM in a more connected manner, especially by contextualizing it
in real-world issues, can make the disciplinary practices within the individual STEM disciplines
more relevant to students and teachers. In another national report published by the US National
Research Council (Duschl, Schweingruber, & Shouse, 2007), the connections within the STEM
disciplines were positioned in light of the Science as Practice perspective (Lehrer & Schuable,
2006). In this perspective, conceptual advancement in scientific disciplines is deeply intertwined
with advances in representational practices and is positioned as the dance of agency between
ideas and the physical world (Pickering, 1995). This perspective, grounded in studies of scientists
in action, thus positions science itself as a heterogeneous discipline where measurement and
instrumentation, including computational approaches are deeply intertwined with the genesis
and refinement of scientific theories and ideas and require multi-disciplinary teams (MacLeod &
Nersessian, 2018).
Breiner, Harkness, Jonson, and Koehler (2012) reminds us that the acronym “STEM” stands
in for a purposeful integration of the individual disciplines “as used in solving real-world problems
(Labov, Reid, & Yamamoto, 2010; Sanders, 2009)” (p. 5). This in turn is based on the notion
of authenticity, as STEM professionals are less likely to compartmentalize disciplines in their
professional practice (Breiner et al., 2012). The “rupture of the intimate association” (Dewey,
1916, p 294) between disciplines in K-16 classrooms has been long noted to be a problem in
public education.
Adopting a more epistemologically grounded approach, Shanahan et al. (2016) noted that
integrated STEM education could be viewed in light of Star’s (2010) notion of boundary objects:
“pragmatic entities valued for their ability to bring collaborators together and facilitate projects
and outcomes that might be impossible otherwise” (Shanahan et al., 2016, p. 134). While
connections across disciplines is also important in this conceptualization, the metaphor of a
boundary object here implies a definition of STEM integration that is neither fixed nor monolithic
but partially shared and situationally established among various stakeholders.
Shanahan et al.’s (2016) conceptualization of STEM integration can therefore be seen as
an emergent phenomenon — i.e., the synthetic whole that results from disciplinary integration
is greater than the sum of its parts. This means that the experience of learning STEM in
an integrated manner is different and richer than simply learning multiple disciplines. Recent
work has identified what some of these emergent formations might look like. As Sengupta,
Shanahan, and Kim (2019) noted, such forms of emergence may be understood through the
lens of transdisciplinarity (which we deal with in more detail in the following section), and may
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 5)
orient us toward different domains (i.e., forms of phenomena) as the topics of inquiry that are
fundamentally more heterogenous than traditionally prescribed curricular topics. Some examples
include critical numeracy (Das & Adams, 2019), critical ecological sustainability (Bang & Marin,
2015; Kim, Rasporich, & Gupta, 2019; Lam-Herrera, Ajkem Council & Sengupta, 2019), and
macroethics (Philip, Gupta, Elby, & Turpen, 2018; Gupta, Turpen, Philip, & Elby, 2019).
Transdisciplinarity and Critical Perspectives for STEM Integration
In defining transdisciplinarity, we start our discussion by posing a fundamental question: What is
discipline? Discipline, as discussed by Pickering (1995), enables humans to extend their concep-
tual practices: “Disciplines — acquired in training and refined in use — carry human conceptual
practices along, as it were, independently of individual wishes and intents” (p. 115). Disci-
plined ways of using cultural tools and representations (e.g., using disciplined ways of symbols
and conceptualizing along with them in algebra) bring humans otherwise-impossible conceptual
and representational practices. In this sense, discipline is agentive, enabling, liberating and
productive.
Etymologically, the term discipline comes from the Latin word discipulus that originally
meant “to educate” but “its connotations over the millennia have shifted considerably to now
referring in English to processes of control, at times linked with punishment in one instance
and sycophantic allegiance and followers, as in disciplines, in another” (Gordon, 2006, p. 3).
Foucault (1977) argued that “discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies.
Discipline increases the force of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these
same forces (in political terms of obedience)” (p. 138). That is, discipline turns power into
an “aptitude” or a “capacity,” a form of capital within the learner that is both increased and
focused, while at the same time controlled in scope through a “strict” subjugation of disciplinary
practices.
An important mechanism of disciplinary subjugation is also the siloed nature of disciplines
in the academy. Foucault (1997/2007) noted that “discipline is a mode of individualization
of multiplicities” (p. 12), acting on a multiplicitous whole rather than, first and foremost,
on a collection of individuals as was also noted by Dewey (1916) and continues to be largely
true to this day. Gordon (2006) frames this issue as disciplinary decadence, noting that the
reification of disciplines and the drive to sustain structures and hierarchies within disciplines
has led to “the forgetting of their impetus in living human subjects and their crucial role in
both the maintenance and transformation of knowledge-producing practices” (p. 4). Human
impetus in knowledge-producing practices, its commitment to fundamental societal problems,
and living dialogues among disciplinarily-enabled subjects have come to be lost in such a fallacy
of constrained and isolated disciplines. This stands in contrast to studies of professional practice
in scientific and technological domains — both in research and practice — that highlight the
necessity of collaboration and multidisciplinarity (Sobieszczanski-Sobieski, 1995; MacLeod &
Nersessian, 2018), uncertainty (Duschl, 2008) and fluidity in professional practices (Sharp &
Robinson, 2004) in solving complex “real-world” problems.
These seemingly oppositional connotations of discipline — to educate and to control, to liber-
ate and to constrain, and to create anew and to reproduce — highlight the issue we problematize
in this article. If discipline simultaneously affords the abundance of knowings and constrains our
knowings, how can we mobilize discipline more toward epistemological and ontological liberation?
Historically, the current institutional system of discipline has been entangled with geo-political
configuration of the world. As Mignolo (2009) maintains, disciplinary knowledge has long been
linked with the colonial matrix of power, truly achievable only by those who are afforded a
supposedly neutral view by the privilege of their position atop that hierarchy. Extending Franz
Fanon’s dictum on language, Mignolo scrutinizes the current and historical disciplinary practices
where the geographically marginalized at once “come closer to being a real human being in direct
ratio to his or her mastery of disciplinary norms” (p. 165) while also being excluded for fully
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 6)
achieving disciplinary personhood. According to Mignolo (2011), breaking the alienation and
self-serving reproduction of disciplines requires “epistemic disobedience” (p. 45) against disci-
plinary coloniality. Epistemic disobedience is led by decolonial thinking, “thinking that de-links
and opens ... to the possibilities hidden by the modern rationality” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 46). From
this perspective, liberation of discipline is to relinquish geo-political constraints and to aim for
expansion of epistemological boundaries.
For us, this act of liberating disciplinary boundaries is the essence of transdisciplinarity.
Strong, Adams, Bellino, Pieroni, Stoops, and Das (2016) argue that a “critical transdisciplinary
heuristic” (p. 227) that challenges colonial matrix of knowing and being will move science
education or STEM education toward “equity, social justice, and polysemia” (p. 235). It should
bring into question fundamental elements of the disciplinary infrastructure in light of histories of
oppression that typically remain silenced in the canonical representations in disciplinary cultures.
For example, Das and Adams’ (2019) formulation of critical numeracy illustrates how engaging
with histories of and literary work on racialized oppression in the US can challenge the ontological
status of numbers as truth, while deepening marginalized students’ ownership of disciplinarily
valued mathematical practices.
This is a critical, expansive and emergent vision of transdisciplinarity. It is expansive and
emergent in the sense that transdisciplinarity is experienced as “reflexive formations and prac-
tices” (Sengupta et al., 2019, p. 4), where learning in one discipline can be deepened through
engaging with other disciplinary lenses. At the same time, this is not merely an act of seeing
more (Higgins, 2008) — rather seeing more critically and historically (Guti´errez, 2016; Sengupta
et al., 2019). Central to such experiences of transdisciplinarity, as Gordon (2006) argued, is
the act of teleological suspension, which happens “when a discipline suspends its own centering
because of a commitment to questions greater than the discipline itself” (p. 34). Commitment
to questions greater than the discipline itself fundamentally requires interactions among disci-
plinary boundaries that create new places of encounters and interactions, in the same way that
the places where fluids meet creates a boundary layer (Shanahan, 2011). The creation of this
boundary layer can interrupt disciplinary hegemonies and can also lead to the emergence of new
concepts, representations, and applications, that ideally should also re-centre voices from the
margins (Sengupta et al., 2019).
For us, an integral part of this work involves interrogating transdisciplinarity “for whom”
(Philip et al., 2018). Colourblind and assimilationist efforts do not attend to the cultural het-
erogeneity in students’ work, nor the historical and systemic violence and barriers experienced
by students from non-dominant groups (Guti´errez & Rogoff, 2003; Lee, 2008; Lee, Spencer, &
Harpalani, 2007; Rosebery et al., 2010; Martin, 2009). These multi-layered conceptualization
of transdisciplinarity in STEM Education guided our critical review of the literature and our
review is refracted through this lens.
Transdisciplinarity and Discourse
Central to our work is the positioning of STEM Education research itself as discourse. As Kelly
(2014) pointed out in the context of science education, discourse entails more than the words and
phrases used for the communication of ideas, bringing into view how communities “collectively
construct norms and expectations, define common knowledge for the group, build affiliation,
frame knowledge made available, provide access to disciplinary knowledge, and invite or limit
participation” (p 321). The study of classroom discourse has long been a mainstay in science
and mathematics education, as it reveals: how affiliation and identity are constructed through
language-in-use (e.g., Herbel-Eisenmann, Wagner, Johnson, Suh, & Figueras, 2015; Langer-
Osuna & Esmonde, 2017; Shanahan & Nieswandt, 2011), how students and teachers engage in
conceptual and representational practices central to doing science and mathematics (e.g., Lemke,
1990; Moschkovich, 2007; Rosebery et al., 2010; Sengupta, Dickes, & Farris, 2018; Sfard, 2007),
and the role that ideologies play in shaping disciplinary engagement (Philip et al., 2018).
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 7)
Rather than focusing on classroom discourse as practiced in the articles we reviewed, we use
discourse analysis to demonstrate how ideologies around global competitiveness and innovation
for capital production have shaped the discourse of STEM education research in terms of rela-
tionships between the constituent disciplines. Our work arises from the concern that ideological
positionings of STEM in classroom discourse also shape opportunities for disciplinary learning
(Slaton, 2001; Philip et al., 2018). For example, ideological assumptions that technical knowledge
(e.g., structural issues related to building construction) is unrelated to human well-being (e.g.,
who are being served in the building and how) can limit the scope of learning in an engineering
course (Slaton, 2001). For our purposes, this is also related to conceptualizations of trans-
disciplinarity, because a discipline that brings together both structural engineering and careful
considerations about human experiences is fundamentally more complex than any discipline that
would focus singularly on any one of these dimensions. Furthermore, such ideological positionings
may also shape the language-in-use in classrooms (Philip et al., 2018), and this is particularly
significant given that science and mathematics educators have shown the importance of paying
attention to (and supporting) heterogeneity in students’ language use, while also illustrating how
specific forms of discourse in the classroom can also limit participation (Kelly, 2014; Rosebery et
al., 2010; Takeuchi, 2016). In other words, our concern is that ideological positionings of STEM
may have been intrinsically shaping conceptualizations of transdisciplinarity in STEM education
research, and along with it, opportunities to participate in learning in classrooms.
Our overarching view of discourse is based on Foucault (1991) who argued that analyzing
discourse is not about understanding the forms of language or uncovering hidden meanings
buried within it. Foucault treats discourse as “a monument to be described in its intrinsic
configurations” (p. 60). The notion of discourse as a monument emphasizes its materiality that
emerges from particular conditions and shapes and redefines the contemporary practices that
follow from it, for example, by setting the “limits and forms of the sayable” (p. 59). In this view,
discourse is not a window into the minds and thoughts of those who created it but an edifice
that can be used to understand the field in which it was created and deployed.
While keeping our central focus on the value of examining discourse as a monument, enlarging
our framing from Foucault to take a broader critical discourse analysis perspective enables us
to further scrutinize texts in terms of “how social agents make or ‘texture’ texts by setting
up relations between their elements” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 11). Hall (1992) emphasized the
importance of attending to relationships to power when making sense of discourses and ideologies,
because “it is power, rather than the facts about reality, which makes things ‘true’” (Hall, 1992,
p. 203). Thus, discourse can both enable and limit ways in which a certain topic (in our case,
for example, STEM education) is constructed and practiced, and it is along these lines that
Philip et al. (2018) demonstrated how ideological convergence and expansion limits or expands
opportunities for learning in STEM classrooms. As Luke (2019) notes, critical discourse analysis
allows us “to see how broader formations of discourse and power are manifest in the everyday,
quotidian aspects of texts in use” (p. 10). Dominant discourses around the role of science in
society shape languages and practices in STEM education research and policy. In this article, we
therefore use this multifactorial discourse analysis approach to demonstrate how macrosystemic
discourses are shaping the discipline of STEM education and propose ways how we can mobilize
such boundaries through the conceptual tool of transdisciplinarity.
Methodology
Inclusion Criteria
Our literature review covers the period between January 2007 and March 2018 and we created
two sets of databases. The first database was to gauge trends in the number of publications
on STEM Education over time. For this analysis, we used the database EBSCO Academic
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 8)
Search Complete that encompasses academic journals in the field of education (beyond our
target journals for the second database). We conducted keyword search to see the number of
publications that include “STEM education” or “STEM learning.” Our search was limited to
peer-reviewed journal articles that were published in English for a period of 10 years between
January 2007 to December 2017 (in order to create a database of an exact 10 years period, we did
not include any publications between January to March 2018). The total number of publications
in this database was 2,171 articles. We created the second database for close review of articles
in 22 English-medium international journals (see Appendix). First, we selected relevant journals
ranked in the top 100 in the Scimago Journal and Country Rank (SJR) within the field of
education, as of March 2018. Among these journals we decided to focus on articles in science
education, mathematics education, and the learning sciences. We decided to focus on science and
mathematics education because scholarship on integrated STEM education builds directly on the
published research in these fields, and they are also integral components of STEM education.
Furthermore, science and mathematics are well edified in K-12 curricula, both nationally and
internationally, whereas computing and engineering education are only beginning to find their
places in K-12 classrooms. In addition to the SJR, after consulting with colleagues in science
and mathematics education, we added other impactful journals that are not ranked in the top
100 in SJR as of 2018.
For 21 out of 22 journals (except for the International Journal of STEM Education, as ex-
plained later in this paragraph), we identified relevant articles for our review, by using the
following search keywords in article titles, keywords, abstract or texts (excluding references):
“STEM education,” “STEM learning,” and “STEM reform.” This selection criterion does not
allow us to collect all the published studies in the STEM education field, as there are studies that
involve transdisciplinary approaches in STEM education but do not label themselves as STEM.
Nonetheless, we intentionally limited our search this way, in order to understand the meanings
researchers have attached to the very term, STEM, in relation to education, learning and edu-
cational reforms. Using this method, a total of 140 articles were selected for review. Among the
140 articles, 10 articles were non-empirical and either a literature review or a discussion paper.
We used these 10 articles for broader discourse analyses but excluded these from the descrip-
tive statistics presented in the Findings section. In addition, we reviewed articles published in
the International Journal of STEM Education because the journal explicitly focuses on STEM
education. For this journal, we looked for the special issue topics as well as the “hot topics”
that were identified by the journal. Fourteen articles published in the journal’s special issues
were selected for our close review. One of these articles was a literature review and was thus
excluded from descriptive statistics. In total, we closely reviewed 154 articles and among these,
143 empirical study articles were used for descriptive statistics presented in the Findings section.
Analysis
The first phase of our analysis involved emergent coding and descriptive statistics analysis to
explore the theoretical assumptions, research questions, methodology, major findings, and dis-
ciplinary areas of each of the empirical studies included in our sample (n=143). This analysis
provided an overarching picture of the emergent orientation across the studies. To dig deeper into
the power of the underlying orientation of these studies, our second and third phases of analysis
employed critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003; Foucault, 1991; Hall, 1992; Luke, 2019)
to examine assumptions, ideologies and potential power relationships in the context of STEM
education. As we explained above, the articles we reviewed for this phase included theoretical,
review and position papers (n=154). Our focus was on identifying the directions of research and
ideological influences that were shared among the articles, and our analysis revealed the strong
influence of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The third phase of our analysis was
another round of critical discourse analysis focused on the ways in which the articles used the
definitions and framings of the NGSS documents. We describe each phase in more detail next.
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 9)
Phase 1. First, we read each article and took reading notes focusing on the following areas:
a) theoretical assumptions, b) research questions, c) methodology, d) major findings, and e)
disciplinary areas. The goal of this analysis was to present a detailed overview and trend of
published articles on STEM education along these dimensions. These notes, along with PDF
files of the articles were imported into NVivo (QSR International Pty Ltd, 2018). We reviewed
the articles independently and met together several times to discuss and solidify the codes. Each
article was reviewed by at least two researchers. Twenty percent of the cases were then selected
to establish an inter-rater reliability. Two researchers independently coded these cases and we
established an agreement rate of 98% and an inter-rater reliability of .85 (Krippendorff’s alpha),
which indicates strong agreement.
Phase 2. In the second phase of our analysis, we analysed how “broader formations of dis-
course and power” (Luke, 2019, p. 10) manifest themselves in the descriptive statistics in Phase
1. We also employed discourse analysis tools introduced by Fairclough (2003), such as habit-
ual collocation (i.e., habitual patterns of connecting words that are immediately one to three
words away), grammatical mood (i.e., assertive, interrogative, or imperative), legitimatization
(i.e., different strategies to legitimatize argument), and nominalization and metaphorical repre-
sentations. We reviewed articles together, and we had multiple meetings to discuss particular
articles and solidify our analyses guided by critical discourse analysis. This led us to identify
two thematic elements that capture and illuminate much of what constitutes the monument of
STEM education discourse: the influence of NGSS and pipeline metaphors.
Phase 3. To further examine these two thematic elements (the influence of NGSS and pipeline
metaphors), guided by critical discourse analysis, we also examined whether there is any contra-
diction in the rhetoric in the texts. Through such analysis, we collectively came to understand
what counts as acceptable, as well as what counts as unsayable (Foucault, 1977; 1991) in the
current STEM education research literature, including how pipeline metaphors have become
and frequent and problematic discourse element. This phase of analysis also involved identifying
conflictual epistemologies as reflected in the theoretical framework, discussion and implications
in each article. We analysed the percentage of articles that cited the NGSS documents (such as
NGSS Lead States, 2013), how NGSS was mentioned and positioned in the articles, as well as
the ways in which those documents set up relations between their linguistic elements.
Findings
Trends in STEM Education Publications
Figure 1 shows the trend in terms of growth in the number of publications between January
2007 and December 2017 (total number: n=2,171). As seen here, the number of peer-reviewed
publications on STEM education grew significantly over this period. For example, in 2017, the
number of publications increased by a factor of 20 compared to 2007.
Figure 1: Number of publications using “STEM education” as a keyword (2007-2017).
We also found that the key words “STEM education,” “STEM learning,” or “STEM reform”
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 10)
have been taken up much more frequently in science education journals than mathematics ed-
ucation journals or general education journals (Figure 2): 91 articles were published in science
education journals, compared to 11 articles in mathematics education journals, and 38 articles
in general education journals. As seen in Figure 2, some major mathematics education journals
(Educational Studies in Mathematics, For the Learning of Mathematics) did not have any articles
found with the key word search of “STEM education,” “STEM learning,” or “STEM reform.”
This discrepancy in the ways in which “STEM” was taken up between the science education
community and the mathematics education community suggests how STEM education has been
predominantly shaped by the science education community and the scholarly discourse within
science education.
Figure 2: Number of publications using “STEM education” as a keyword (2007-2017).
Transdisciplinarity (or the Lack Thereof) in the Current STEM Edu-
cation Research
Our examination of the disciplinary concepts and areas that the studies focused on reveals a
dearth of studies that can be considered as interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary. As defined
earlier, interdisciplinarity refers to amalgamation of two or more disciplines, whereas transdis-
ciplinarity goes beyond the amalgamation; the relationship among disciplines is not additive,
rather reflexive and emergent. In addition, questioning hegemonic disciplinary assumptions and
practices is also at the core of our definition of transdisciplinarity. Examples of such transdis-
ciplinary research include community-based design research by Bang and colleagues (Bang &
Marin, 2015; Bang & Medin, 2010) that question the “settled” nature of epistemologies of West-
ern science through centralizing Indigenous cultural practices, epistemologies and ontologies.
Philip et al. (2018) presented an axiological challenge to normative curricula and pedagogies
in engineering education by questioning and making explicit its underlying militaristic ideolo-
gies in the undergraduate classroom. Each of these articles present an expansive re-imagination
of disciplinary work by revealing hegemonic traditions within the discipline while also offering
critical historical re-orientations (Ahmed, 2006). This brings new forms of phenomena within
the purview of the disciplines, as well as deepens engagement with concepts and practices that
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 11)
are traditionally viewed as central to the disciplines. However, evidence of such critical and
expansive conceptualizations of transdisciplinarity was absent in our current database.
Despite the implied sense of interdisciplinarity in “integrated” STEM education, we found
that only five studies (out of 143) were considered to be interdisciplinary in terms of their ex-
plicit emphasis on two or more disciplines. For example, Berland and Steingut (2016) measured
students’ intrinsic motivation in a year-long engineering, mathematics and science course that
incorporated multiple design challenges such as designing and building a pinhole camera and
analysing data to redesign a model wind turbine. Clark, Sengupta, Brady, Martinez-Garza, and
Killingsworth (2015) centralized the concept of disciplinary integration in their design of digital
games to support students’ scientific practice. In their design, players (learners) iteratively de-
velop and design computational and mathematical representations in the context of modelling
Newtonian motion. Burgin, McConnell, and Flowers (2015) organized a research apprentice-
ship program for high school students to work on biofuels-related research projects in university
chemistry and engineering laboratories. Geiger et al. (2018) focused on the interdisciplinary col-
laboration among scientists and mathematicians in the process of developing a STEM Education
module focusing on modelling. Lamb, Akmal, and Petrie (2015) described students’ self-efficacy
through the integrated STEM learning, incorporating direct STEM integrated instruction, Lego
Robotics, the Architects in Schools Program, and partnership with the National Air and Space
Museum.
Aligned well with the prevalence of STEM education articles in science education journals
compared to mathematics education journals, STEM education was largely situated in studies
on learning and teaching of sciences (n=45) rather than studies of learning and teaching of
mathematics (n=14) (see Figure 3). Even in the articles situated in mathematics education,
mathematical representations and practices were defined as STEM because of their applicability
to the discipline of science (as seen in Jones, 2015; Ruthven & Hofmann, 2013; Schuchardt
& Schunn, 2016). The practice of science as modelling — which is also one of the defining
paradigms in contemporary science education (Duschl & Grandy, 2008; NGSS Lead States,
2013) — largely served as the epistemological anchor in which such forms of interdisciplinarity
were grounded. In contrast, the articles focusing on the concept or practice of science tended
not to draw a connection with the discipline of mathematics. What counts as mathematical
expertise, for example, as reported in studies of expert mathematicians (Schoenfeld & Herrmann,
1982; Wilkerson & Wilensky, 2011), was not consulted within these articles. Instead, in these
articles, disciplinary practices in science education were redefined as STEM education by making
explicit the connection between scientific modelling as a design-based practice and the practices
of engineering design, as set out in the NGSS standard (as seen in Capobianco, DeLisi, & Radloff,
2017; Chabalengula & Mumba, 2017; King & English, 2016; Peterman, Daugherty, Custer, &
Ross, 2017). We can therefore conclude that across the studies we reviewed, the discourse in
science education predominantly shaped what counts as integrated STEM education.
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 12)
Figure 3: Number of publications on STEM education according to disciplinary areas.
Note: where appropriate, multiple-coding was used.
Another interesting finding concerns the prevalence of computational modeling, making and
maker spaces, and robotics. Although the notions of tinkering, play, digital games, robotics and
the use of computational modeling in science and mathematics education has a longer history
(Kafai et al., 1996; Papert, 1980; Resnick, Eisenberg & Berg, 2000; Turkle and Papert, 1991;
Wilensky & Reisman, 2006), explicit attention to interdisciplinarity in the context of integrating
computing with STEM education is both relatively scarce and recent. For example, despite the
growing attention of computational thinking in STEM education (e.g., diSessa, 2018; Khine,
2018; Sengupta, Kinnebrew, Basu, Biswas, & Clark, 2013), we only found a few studies that
focused on computational thinking and modeling with the explicit mention of STEM education.
Wilkerson-Jerde, Wagh, and Wilensky (2015) conducted design-based research by introducing
DeltaTick, the agent-based modelling platform they developed. Sinclair and Patterson (2018)
documented students’ computational thinking practices, in mathematics classes utilizing the
Geometer’s Sketchpad. In the context of K-12 computer sciences education, Philip, Olivares-
Pasillas, and Rocha (2016) examined whether and how students attend to the racialized histories
and context of data as they engage in data visualization. In the context of learning science
using digital games, Clark et al. (2015) integrated computational representations in players’
experiences.
In the context of learning through making, we found that the direct influence of science
education was less prevalent. Pinkard, Erete, Martin, and McKinney de Royston (2017) described
an after-school program where non-dominant middle school girls designed digital media and using
various forms of art and computational circuits. The focus of this study was not on learning about
the physics of electricity, rather it was on supporting the development of marginalized students’
computing identities. DiGiacomo and Guti´errez (2016) led an after-school program in a low-
income predominantly Latino suburban community. In their program, students engaged in maker
activities to make and tinker with Squishy Circuits or Scribbling Machines. Similar to the study
by Pinkard et al. (2017), learning within the disciplines of science or computer science was not the
focus of the authors’ inquiry; instead their emphasis was on identifying the role that “relational
equity” played in supporting tinkering. However, despite the lack of direct attention to science
and mathematics education research, the centrality of electrical circuitry and computational
work as the anchors of integrated STEM in both these studies suggest that technologies that
were initially designed within the purview of science (and mathematics) education are now being
positioned as the locus of integrated STEM education.
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 13)
The lack of clear or specific focus on disciplinary concepts and topics (e.g., force and motion
or chemical reactions in science education; derivatives and quadratic functions in mathematics
education) across the articles we reviewed, however, is a robust finding in our analysis (see Figure
3). Generally, these studies (which we categorized as “non-specified”) focused on students’ future
career visions and choices with regards to STEM disciplines, instead of students’ learning of
particular concepts or learning experiences within specific courses. This in turn implies that
“STEM education” was predominantly positioned as a context where learners’ STEM identities
and making practices were investigated with a clear emphasis on workforce or career readiness,
but without a focus on disciplinary concepts and practices that were in play during the learning
experiences.
Assumptions Underlying “Integration”: Further Problematizing Inter-
disciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity
In this section, we interrogate the epistemological assumptions that underlie notions of inte-
gration and interdisciplinarity in STEM education. We first identify where the studies were
conducted, with what age groups, and methodological and theoretical framings of these stud-
ies. We then present a critical discourse analysis of the influences of NGSS in shaping STEM
Education research, partly due to the dominance of US-based research and publication venues.
Along this line of analysis, we also examine some of the prevalent metaphors that are shaping
the current discourse in STEM education research. Overall, this section reveals the nature of
hegemonic practices that have shaped (and continues to shape) STEM education research.
Colonial matrix: Countries where studies were conducted
Out of the 143 empirical studies that we reviewed, 88% or 126 articles were conducted in the
United States, followed by England (n=3), Australia (n=2), Belgium (n=2), and Norway (n=2).
Other countries include Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Israel, Slovenia, South Africa, Sweden, and
Turkey, and only one study involved more than one country. With our current search criteria,
we noticed that no article represented STEM education in Asia.
This overwhelming focus on the United States could be partially because our search focused
on English-medium publications, but also probably because the notion of STEM education orig-
inated in the United States historically (Shanahan et al., 2016). As Shanahan et al. (2016)
argued, the emphasis on STEM education in the United States has historically been rooted in
concerns for national security and militarization, as evident in A Nation at Risk published in
the post-Sputnik era (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). In Charting a
Course for Success: America’s Strategy for STEM Education, a government-issued publication
in 2018, we can observe how the urge for national security continues to shape visions for STEM
education in the United States:
Since the founding of the Nation, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
(STEM) have been a source of inspirational discoveries and transformative techno-
logical advances, helping the United States develop the world’s most competitive
economy and preserving peace through strength. The pace of innovation is acceler-
ating globally, and with it the competition for scientific and technical talent. Now
more than ever the innovation capacity of the United States — and its prosperity
and security — depends on an effective and inclusive STEM education ecosystem
(Committee on STEM Education of the National Science and Technology Council,
2018, p. v).
As evident in this vision statement, nationalistic discourse — characterized by the dual focus
on national security and economic competition — is central to defining and positioning STEM
education as an area worthy of immediate attention across the United States. However, in
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 14)
the articles we reviewed, the influences of national security or militarization are not mentioned
overtly, except for Philip et al. (2018), who explicitly analysed the intersection between ideologies
and engineering students’ disciplinary learning.
Drawing from Mignolo (2009), we had problematized disciplinary practices as hegemonic in
light of their historical links with the colonial matrix of power and the geo-political configuration
of the world. The current dominance in the United States context in STEM education research
implicitly perpetuates such geo-political configuration of epistemology and axiology to define the
discipline of STEM education.
Methodological assumptions
A particular pattern that emerged in our analysis is the predominant focus on secondary and
postsecondary education (as seen in Figure 4). As we will discuss more in the following section,
nearly all of these studies confine their methodological scope to relatively short time periods
in students’ lives. This stands in contrast to Roth and Eijck’s (2010) call for shifting our
methodological focus to longer time scales. They compiled their studies across diverse age
ranges (from Kindergarten children to postsecondary students) and proposed “fullness of life”
as the unit of analysis. They wrote:
To understand lifelong, life-deep, and life-wide STEM learning, we need models and
theories that capture the phenomenon of interest both in the concrete instances that
it realizes itself (synchronically) and over long periods of time (diachronically) (p.
1040).
In our review, we found that none of the studies considered “fullness of life” in their method-
ological approaches. This was also evident in the form of lack of attention to the early years
or out-of-school or post-formal schooling context such as studies on parents and professional
settings.
Figure 4: Number of publications and context of study.
Note: If age group was specified for Out-of-School, the study was coded multiple times
(e.g., Out-of-School/Elementary).
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 15)
As shown in Figure 4, most studies were conducted in postsecondary (n=43) and secondary
contexts (n=42). Significantly fewer studies focused on elementary grades and the early years
(i.e., Pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten through Grade 3). Only six studies explicitly focused
on STEM education in elementary grades and none of the studies focused exclusively on the
early years. A number of studies were conducted with multiple age groups (n=14), some of
which include students in the early years or elementary school. For example, DiGiacomo and
Guti´errez’s (2016) after-school program involved Grade 2 to Grade 5 students. However, most
of the studies categorized for “not one age group” studied the program for upper elementary
school to secondary students. The studies on teacher professional development (n=14) and pre-
service teacher education (n=7) were further broken down into elementary teacher education
(n=7), secondary teacher education (n=10), postsecondary education (n=1), when the context
was specified. Overall, these findings point to a relative lack of attention to STEM education in
the early years and lower elementary grades. We speculate that this skewed focus on secondary
and postsecondary contexts relates to the preponderance of another research theme — STEM
career choices or career preparedness — which orients the research focus on whether secondary
and postsecondary students are being prepared to choose or are going to choose further studies
and/or professionalization in STEM disciplines. We will further investigate this point in a later
section where we focus on how the pipeline metaphor has shaped research in STEM education.
Other contexts that are relatively under-examined include professional practice in STEM or
STEM-related disciplines (n=2) and professional practices of parents of school-aged children in
STEM or STEM-related fields (n=1). Azevedo and Mann (2017) studied the practices of amateur
astronomers focusing on their embodied action and reasoning. Skinner et al. (2018) conducted
a study on intelligent training systems for surgeons on robotic assisted laparoscopic surgery.
The STEM-related practices that families of school-aged children engage in their everyday lives
also have not been examined, with the exception of Civil (2016) who investigated how parents’
mathematical practices and professional practices (e.g., welder, mechanic, seamstress) can shape
their children’s disciplinary engagements.
Overall, compared to classroom-based studies (including those that focus on teacher educa-
tion and teacher professional development), a much fewer number of studies focused on out-of-
school settings (in school: n=112; out of school: n=15). Some examples include STEM education
initiatives designed in out-of-school contexts include a community-based summer camp with in-
digenous communities (Bang & Medin, 2010), a summer institute on youth participatory action
research for environmental studies (Mark, 2017), Maker Faires (Dixon & Martin, 2017), and
afterschool programs for digital media making and making/tinkering (DiGiacomo & Guti´errez,
2016; Pinkard et al., 2017). Only one study in our database focused on bridging learning across
formal and informal settings. Adams and Gupta (2017) investigated the affordances of an infor-
mal science institution in supporting teacher candidates understand how people learn and how
to engage with diverse learners.
We believe that these patterns observed in contexts of study are also related to the method-
ological approaches adopted in the studies (see Figure 5). The most frequently chosen methods
in our current database were surveys (n=27, 18.8%), case studies (n=24, 16.7%), and interviews
(n=20, 13.9%). The types of surveys used include students’ self-reporting in questionnaires,
students’ achievement test data from high-stakes tests, and psychological assessments (e.g., self-
efficacy questionnaire). For example, Andersen and Ward (2014) used the High School Longi-
tudinal Study of 2009 in the United States and examined racial differences in the relationship
between students’ future plans to pursue STEM-related disciplines and students’ evaluation of
themselves as a science or mathematics person on a questionnaire. We take this issue up again in
a later section, as we discuss the correlation between the use of these methodological approaches
and use of the pipeline metaphor. We also found that overall 22.2% (n=32) articles did not spec-
ify the methodological frameworks or approaches. In contrast, 87.8% of the articles identified
their methodological frameworks explicitly, demonstrating a range that includes decolonizing
methodology, hermeneutics, participatory action research, and design-based research.
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 16)
Figure 5: Methodologies and methods used in STEM education research.
Note: Where appropriate, multiple coding was used.
This methodological diversity suggests the co-existence of several divergent ontologies and
epistemologies within the field of STEM education research that cannot be easily reconciled. In
survey-based studies (n=27), certain attributes of learners (e.g., gender, race, socioeconomic sta-
tus) tend to be treated as independent variables (e.g., Andersen & Ward, 2014; Bottia, Mickelson,
Giersch, Stearns, & Moller, 2017; Cerinsek, Hribar, Glodez, & Dolinsek, 2013; Sahin, Ekmekci, &
Waxman, 2017). Drawing from a large number of samples of learners, these studies highlighted
how race, gender and socioeconomic status affect students’ aspirations to pursue STEM-related
disciplines and careers. In contrast, focusing on a small number of learners, studies drawing upon
from phenomenology (McGee & Bentley, 2017), narrative inquiry (Craig, Verma, Stokes, Evans,
& Abrol, 2018), or ethnography (Allen & Eisenhart, 2017; Nasir & Vakil, 2017) elucidate in
what ways students’ identities and STEM-related disciplines become intertwined. For example,
McGee and Bentley (2017) illustrate salient events that highlight the pervasiveness of racism,
sexism, and race-gender bias for Black women in STEM disciplines. Instead of taking race,
gender and socioeconomic status for granted, these studies try to understand the intersectional
contexts in which learners’ identities become salient in their STEM learning experiences.
We found a methodological convergence between design as a pedagogical approach and design-
based research as a methodological approach (Bang & Marin, 2015; Carreira & Baioa, 2017; Clark
et al., 2015; Gaydos & Squire, 2012; Geiger et al., 2018; King & English, 2016; Nasir & Vakil,
2017; Pinkard et al., 2017; Ruthven & Hofmann, 2013). In these studies, design was also the
practice that learners engaged in, thus positioning design as a fundamentally interdisciplinary
practice that can integrate STEM disciplines. For example, some researchers engaged in the
design of new technologies for STEM education such as disciplinary-integrated games, and stu-
dents in their studies also engaged in designing games and models for science learning (as seen
in Clark et al., 2015; Gaydos & Squire, 2012).
Other researchers designed social infrastructures to support marginalized students’ engage-
ment with STEM beyond the traditional school contexts (Bang & Marin, 2015; DiGiacomo &
Guti´errez, 2016; Pinkard et al., 2017). Such design efforts are aligned well with the notion of
social design (Guti´errez & Jurow, 2016), where social justice is central to both the experience of
learning and conceptualizing what STEM education can look like. Social design involves social
transformation that “is sought by creating a significant reorganization of systems of activity in
which participants becoming designers of their own futures” (Guti´errez & Jurow, 2016, p. 566).
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 17)
Along similar lines, Nasir and Vakil (2017) explicitly connected ethnographic methodology and
design-based research in their methodology, combining ethnographic description of how it is with
design of how it can be could move the research toward development of new tools, programs, and
technologies, from the close relationships between researchers and participants. However, it is
also important to note that barring these few studies, such methodological convergence between
design, social justice and design-based research was not explicit in our current database.
There were relatively few studies that followed students or programs longitudinally, i.e., for
more than a year (n=12 or 8.3%). One group of the longitudinal studies (n=8) was based on
surveys, questionnaires and student achievement data. For example, Bottia et al. (2017) used
longitudinal data on students’ academic performance and scholastic experiences obtained from
the North Carolina Roots of STEM Success project. They analysed how the racial composition
of the school influenced students’ decision to major in STEM, and how this influence evolved
longitudinally. Sadler, Sonnert, Hazari, and Tai (2012) examined gender differences in terms
of the fluctuations in STEM career plans during the high school years. Another group of the
longitudinal studies (n=4) drew from ethnographic methodology (Allen & Eisenhart, 2017; Roth
& Eijck, 2010; Weis et al., 2015) and program evaluation (Falk et al., 2016). For example, Weis
et al. (2015) presented the rise and erosion of STEM education reform based on a three-year
comparative longitudinal and ethnographic study in two cities in the United States, Buffalo and
Denver. Falk et al. (2016) depicted the program they designed and led, Synergies, an ongoing
effort to enhance STEM learning in school and out of school, in a diverse, under-resourced
community in Portland, Oregon. Overall, across the articles, we found scant attention to “thick
description” (Geertz, 1973, p. 7) of the learning experiences that happen across the lifespan.
The Influence of NGSS
Out of the 154 articles (including non-empirical articles) that we reviewed, 47 articles positioned
NGSS as one of the key motivations behind their studies. Set in the context of the United States,
NGSS frames Grade 1–12 standards for physical sciences, life sciences, earth and space science
and engineering, technology and applications of science. Considering the final version of NGSS
was released in April 2013 and our review covers the time range between 2007 and 2018, the
hegemonic influence of NGSS in the current STEM education literature, internationally, is worth
examining.
We analysed the way researchers were oriented in relation to NGSS along a few different
dimensions. First, the current STEM education research is predominantly geographically ori-
ented toward the United States, because most of the articles used NGSS to define or mention
competencies and skills associated with STEM learning. Two notable examples include “design”
or “engineering design process,” which are regarded as key competencies in NGSS (e.g., Balgopal
et al., 2017; Capobianco et al., 2017; Faber, Hardin, Klein-Gardner, & Benson, 2014), and the
“nature of science” (e.g., Adibelli-Sahin & Deniz, 2017; Burgin et al., 2015).
However, the extent to which these articles used NGSS differed. Some articles designed their
studies by centralizing the relevant NGSS standards such as the teacher professional development
and assessment rubric (Chabalengula & Mumba, 2017; Nugent et al., 2015; Tekkumru-Kisa &
Stein, 2017; Varelas et al., 2018). Other articles briefly mentioned the key practice or competen-
cies defined by NGSS (e.g., focusing on problem solving skills, analysing and interpreting data,
and defining content of STEM teaching) to contextualize their studies or findings. For exam-
ple, mentioning NGSS performance expectations, Wild (2015) contextualized his findings on a
correlation between students’ career expectations in sciences and their perception on learning
environment as follows:
Despite the challenges, the current wave of curriculum reform outlined in the Next
Generation Science Standards (NGSS) (Achieve, 2013) may nudge teachers to facil-
itate more constructivist classrooms. (...) Moreover, the NGSS performance expec-
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 18)
tations require students to integrate scientific practices, core disciplinary ideas, and
cross-cutting concepts. (...) Although it remains to be seen how the NGSS will af-
fect classrooms, the considerable overlap between features of a constructivist learning
environment and the vision of the Standards provides glimmers of hope for more
equitable science education (Wild, 2015, p. 2299).
What is not made explicit in this type of rhetoric is the possibility of how NGSS performance
expectations could hinder “equitable science education,” despite the latter being described as
a desirable outcome. For example, career expectations, a construct that was used to measure
the success of “constructivist classrooms” in Wild’s (2015) study, does not account for or focus
on the actual learning experiences of the students. These authors argue that NGSS emphasizes
cross-cutting scientific practices and is therefore aligned with constructivist approaches, but
they do not take into account if or how NGSS guidelines, based on how they are interpreted and
implemented in the classroom, can limit the scope of learning experiences. For example, Pruitt
(2014) identified the difference between adoption and implementation in classrooms as a key
challenge of praxis, and Philip et al. (2018) have also argued that adoption of national curricular
mandates and expectations without considering carefully the underlying political ideological
forces and assumptions can be deeply problematic. We revisit this issue in more detail in the
following subsection.
We also analysed “legitimation strategies” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 88) used in researchers’
rhetoric in relation to NGSS. We found that NGSS was often treated as an authoritative mandate
and a set of objective standards to be followed. The following excerpt from Faber et al. (2014)
is an example of such a use of NGSS to justify the significance of their research findings:
The Next Generation Science Standards place a focus on science and engineering
practice with the goal of reflecting what scientists and engineers do as they explore,
design, and build (NGSS Lead States, 2013). Given this new emphasis on science
and engineering practice, it is important for teachers to take part in PD experiences
that encourage their development of scientific expertise and their understanding of
scientific practice (Faber et al., 2014, p. 803)
In this text, the habitual collocation discussed by Fairclough (2003) suggests that the visions
and practices promoted by NGSS were described with lexicons such as “emerging,” “recent,”
“key,” and “new.” This collocation pattern implied the significance and urgency of NGSS, and
in association, the significance and urgency of the particular research foci. The following excerpt
is another example that illustrates this point:
The Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012) and the Next Generation
Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013) bring a new vision for science teaching
and learning. This vision is based on key findings from research (NASEM, 2015) such
as integrating knowing and doing is key for science learning (e.g., Pickering, 1992)
and developing understanding through engagement in scientific practices is more pro-
ductive for future learning than memorizing facts (e.g., Cognition and Technology
Group at Vanderbilt, 1993)” (Tekkumru-Kisa & Stein, 2017, p. 1, emphasis added).
Here NGSS was treated as an authoritative document which will “bring a new vision for sci-
ence teaching and learning,” backed by “key findings from research.” The inclusion of STEM
researchers (e.g., researchers in engineering) in the committees that drafted NGSS was also pre-
sented as another reason for positioning NGSS in an authoritative stance, as evident in the
following excerpt:
It is noteworthy that, in the United States, discipline-based researchers in engineer-
ing and natural sciences ensured that disciplinary practices and competencies were
presented alongside each other in the most recent revision of the national science
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 19)
education standards for school-aged students (Balgopal, Casper, Atadero, & Rambo-
Hernandez, 2017, p. 1626).
A few articles, however, adopted a more critical stance (Garibay, 2015; Hoeg & Bencze,
2017b; Storksdieck, 2016; Zeidler, 2016; Zouda, 2018). For example, based on critical discourse
analysis of NGSS, Hoeg and Bencze (2017b) concludes:
Our analysis of the NGSS indicates that it is a set of standards that prioritize measur-
able and reproducible performances. The NGSS appear to be based on a conception of
accessibility closely aligned with equality and self-investment. Innovation and creativ-
ity are discursively constituted as attributes that can be developed through specific,
prescribed practices. These features appear to be associated with the economic values
and principles of neo(new)-liberalism (p. 291)
It is noteworthy that four out of five articles that adopted such critical stances were pub-
lished in Cultural Studies of Science Education, which in turn suggests that there are limited
opportunities for such critiques and “ideological expansion” (Philip et al., 2018, p. 3) of STEM
education in other journals. The dialogic nature in critical stance to NGSS within Cultural
Studies of Science Education is evident in the following excerpt, in which Zouda (2018) presents
an argument by building on the work by Zeidler (2016):
The apparent inability of current STEM education to prepare citizens for life is also a
main concern for Dana Zeidler (2016), who points to problematic issues in how STEM
is presented in different U.S. policy literature, such as the Next Generation Science
Standards (NGSS, 2013). He raises questions about what is omitted, mistreated
and/or superficially presented in STEM education (p. 2).
What these authors are arguing against is the prescribed nature of measurable practices described
in NGSS. They are also concerned about what is left out or absent in images of STEM education
as depicted by NGSS.
Without the nuanced and critical discussions about the standardization that can result from
unproblematic adoption or implementation of NGSS, researchers risk treating disciplinary knowl-
edge as static and ontologically rigid. For example, Nugent et al. (2015) focused on problem
solving as explained in the following way:
While there are numerous learning strategies discussed in the literature, this research
focused specifically on student problem-solving strategies, which has long been a
critical focus of STEM education and is one of the criteria for the designation of a
‘core idea’ in the US Next Generation Science Standards (p. 1073).
In this study, problem solving was measured by pre- and post- multiple-choice assessments
that covered “STEM content within the context of educational robotics activities” (p. 1074).
The underlying assumption here is that STEM knowledge can be decontextualized and robotics
design activities can be reduced to another instructional context for teaching more than one
discipline (in this case, mathematics and computer programming), and not necessarily in an
integrated manner. Thus, neither computer programming nor mathematical reasoning looks
different from traditional contexts, and what counts as disciplinary knowledge in an un-integrated
context remains unchanged in this study. This is an image of a linear addition of disciplines and
stands in contrast to emergent images of disciplinary integration in science labs, which shows
that integration across disciplines often results in new forms of representational and epistemic
practices that advance each of the constituent disciplines (MacLeod & Nersesian, 2016).
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 20)
STEM Choices and Prevalence of Pipeline Metaphor
The most prevalent research topic (i.e., the focus of inquiry) in the current database was what we
grouped as “STEM choices.” This cluster of studies on STEM choices (n=34 or 23.7%) focused
on whether high school or undergraduate students are choosing to study in a STEM discipline or
whether students are aspiring for STEM-related careers. Studies tend to focus on specific student
attributes (e.g., gender, race, socioeconomic status) and discuss the relationship between those
attributes and their prospect of choosing STEM disciplines in postsecondary education or career.
These studies reported interesting findings. On the one hand, male students were more likely
to aspire STEM related disciplines or careers than female students (e.g., Chachashvili-Bolotin,
Milner-Bolotin, & Lissitsa, 2016; Fredricks, Hofkens, Wang, Mortenson, & Scott, 2017; Lee,
2015; Sadler et al., 2012). On the other hand, some studies also reported that gender was not
the most salient factor for students’ choices (e.g., Adamuti-Trache & Sweet, 2014; Cerinsek et
al., 2013; Maltese & Tai, 2011). Similarly, while some studies reported a racial gap in terms of
White students persisting in STEM careers and disciplines compared to students of color (e.g.,
Andersen & Ward, 2014; Wang, 2013), other studies also reported no racial gap in STEM choice
patterns (e.g., Lee, 2015; Maltese & Tai, 2011).
Several studies within the cluster of “STEM choices” also focused on program characteristics
that enhance STEM-related career interests or postsecondary education for underrepresented
youth (e.g., Means et al., 2017). Another set of studies examined how experiences of historically
underrepresented students affect their choices to pursue STEM disciplines. A longitudinal ethno-
graphic study conducted by Allen and Eisenhart (2017) depicted how racial minority high school
girls fought back the common narratives to define them as deficits differently in two schools of
different equity focus. McGee and Bentley (2017) adopted an anti-deficit perspective and high-
lighted the voices of successful Black women majoring in STEM disciplines and highlighted their
resilience in manoeuvring systemic racism and sexism.
Within the cluster of “STEM choice,” we also noticed that the metaphors of pipeline or
pathway were frequently used in the studies in order to depict the connection among secondary
education, postsecondary education and STEM-related careers. These metaphors are directly
derived from the NGSS, which was widely cited in the current database of STEM education
research, as mentioned before. The NGSS Lead States (2013) states:
The United States has a leaky K-12 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
(STEM) talent pipeline, with too few students entering STEM majors and careers
at every level from those with relevant postsecondary certificates to Ph.Ds. We need
new Science standards that stimulate and build interest in STEM (p. xv).
Using critical discourse analysis focusing on metaphorical analysis, nominalization, and causal
relationship (Fairclough, 2003), we further problematize what and where the metaphor of pipeline
or pathway orients us toward. Except for Cannady, Greenwald, and Harris (2014), researchers
who used the pipeline metaphor positioned it unproblematically (Adamuti-Trache & Sweet, 2014;
Andersen & Ward, 2014; Maltese, Melki, & Wiebke, 2014; Sadler et al., 2017; Sahin et al., 2017).
These studies assume and/or define the overarching goal of STEM education in terms of preparing
students to join “the STEM pipeline.” For example, Adamuti-Trache and Sweet (2014) framed
their study on ethnicity and gender differences in students’ STEM-related course selection, as
follows: “It is not surprising that governments, policymakers and educators worldwide express
concerns with the STEM educational pipeline” (p. 611). Andersen and Ward’s (2014) study set
up variables for “STEM pipeline status” (p. 224) and identified factors that could affect students’
persistence. In reviewing the literature, Maltese et al. (2014) coined the issue of students’ losing
interest in STEM as “the leaky pipeline” phenomenon:
Many students lose interest in STEM (the “leaky pipeline” phenomenon), and by the
time students are ready to go to college only a small percentage actually pursue a
degree that will lead to a future STEM career (p. 938).
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 21)
Alternatively, Cannady et al. (2014) suggested the use of “paths” instead of “pipelines.”
They argued that “paths are generally understood to be less rigid than pipes and ‘going off the
beaten path’ has far more positive interpretations than the pipeline counterpart of ‘leaking into
the drain’” (p. 456). Along similar lines, Falk et al. (2016) used the phrase “STEM interest
pathways.” Their design-based research study focused on how contextual factors can create a
wider STEM interest pathway. However, the inertia of the STEM pipeline metaphor was still
present in the authors’ conceptualization of the pathway, as evident in their conceptualization of
pathways leading to careers in STEM: “Clearly, declining numbers of youth pursuing further
STEM education and careers translates into fewer STEM professionals, leading to negative
economic effects related to a lack of qualified workers available to fill the increasing number
of STEM-related jobs” (Falk et al., 2016, p. 202).
In our current database, the most frequently used theoretical framework was sociocultural
theory (n= 23). For this reason, we decided to closely examine the articles that employ so-
ciocultural theory as their framing and also used the metaphor of “pathway” or “pipeline” in
STEM education (n=3). Two of these articles simply mention “pathway” or “pipeline” but did
not situate the learning activities and practices that students were engaged in as contributing to
them joining the pipeline of STEM pathway. Here we focus our critique on only one article that
situated the practice under investigation (i.e., gaming) as central to helping learners join the
pathway or pipeline. Sociocultural theory of learning, based on Vygotsky’s theory, emphasizes a
dialectical unity of learning and development that is situated within and occurs across multiple
histories (Vygotsky, 1978). It emphasizes learning as shifts in participation in communities of
practices and “comprehensive understanding involving the whole person” (Lave & Wenger, 1991,
p. 33). We focused on whether and how this commonly-used theoretical framing was in contact
with the metaphor of “pipeline” or “pathway” in STEM education. For instance, Bricker and
Bell (2012) argued “the incorporation of video and other gaming practices in STEM education is
ripe with possibility with respect to STEM learning” (p. 899). Focusing on a single learner, they
presented an examination of the participant’s gaming ecology with respect to its sociocultural,
historical, and material characteristics and affordances in order to understand how youth can
develop considerable gaming expertise in informal settings. They also positioned such informal
engagement with and expertise in games as potentially supportive for future STEM careers.
However, it is also noteworthy that the video game in question is Halo 2, which is a first-person
shooter game that has been critiqued in terms of its violent, racist and sexist representations
(Nakamura, 2012). Using Halo 2 as a proxy for everyday gaming interests has also been cri-
tiqued as an assumption that foregrounds White masculine perspectives (Ong & Tzuo, 2011;
Ortiz, 2019).
In other words, while the broader cultural context of our everyday lives was certainly being
investigated here as relevant to learners’ interests in STEM education, ideological explorations
in the sense that Philip et al. (2018) argued for, was absent in these studies. Furthermore, even
informal engagement with video games was positioned as a vehicle to help learners enter the
STEM pipeline. This suggests that simply positioning studies as grounded in sociocultural theo-
ries of learning does not necessarily imply an orientation toward social justice, or even adopting
a critical stance that can question the pipeline metaphor, as they might leave out considerations
about ideological and critical theoretical positionings necessary for such orientations.
Summary and Discussion
Overall, we have illustrated how “STEM education” has been construed as a field of research in
the decade of its early formation, focusing on the period between 2007 and early 2018. By inten-
tionally limiting our search to the keywords that include STEM (i.e., STEM education, STEM
learning, STEM reforms), our goal was to interpretively portray the current discourse around
how “STEM” has been positioned in the context of STEM education research. In presenting the
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 22)
rich tapestry of this discourse, we have attempted to illustrate what counts as acceptable, what
is implied and what counts as unsayable (Foucault, 1972; 1991) in STEM education. Grounded
in our own perspective that positions critical transdisciplinarity as central to STEM education
research, we adopted the tools of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003; Hall, 1992). Our
analysis reveals how STEM education research represents the relationships between disciplines,
as well as the macrosystemic discourses and ideological forces that have shaped what learning
is and who the learners are (in the context of STEM education), especially during the period of
early formation of the field. Our review surfaced several ways in which STEM education research
has perpetuated disciplinary and geo-political hegemonies, either explicitly or implicitly. For ex-
ample, our review of international journals depicted Americo-centrism in terms of the policy-level
influences (e.g., NGSS) on the research literature in STEM education. The geopolitical matrix is
interweaved ideologically through an underlying link between nationalist and militaristic ideolo-
gies and STEM education, as evidenced in conversations among engineering students depicted
in Philip et al. (2018), as well as in the critical discourse analysis we presented. While policy
documents explicitly position success in STEM education as central to issues of global competi-
tion and national security, these links are often present implicitly in the form of highly prevalent
nominalized metaphors such as the STEM pipeline and the STEM pathway(s), which in turn are
positioned as the underlying motivation for K-16 STEM education. Fairclough (2003) pointed
out that the effect of nominalization is its power to conceal the agents of action — the subjects
and objects of the action — and to discursively construct an independent entity. In our case,
nominalization masks some of the key questions such as: Who are the subjects created by STEM
pipelines? Where are STEM pipelines orienting us toward?
Instead of answering or even asking these questions, many research articles we reviewed
oriented us toward the discourse of human capital, but without examining how intricately the
notion of human capital is tied to ideological forces of economic growth and global competitive-
ness. Only a handful of articles in our review adopted a critical stance and alerted us to such
discourse through their analyses of policy documents and curricula (e.g., Garibay, 2015; Hoeg &
Bencze, 2017a, 2017b; Storksdieck, 2016; Zeidler, 2016; Zouda, 2018). According to Sen (1997),
human capital focuses on “skill and knowledge as well as effort — in augmenting production
possibilities” (p. 1959). In contrast, the concept of human capabilities underlines the signifi-
cance of “the ability of human beings to lead lives they have reason to value and to enhance the
substantive choices they have” (Sen, 1997, p. 1959). Sen does not deny the fact that economic
growth can lead to the expansion of human freedom to choose the kind of lives they want to live.
However, as is often the case, arguments around human capital tend to concentrate on produc-
tivity and economic growth and do not extend the discussion to “why economic growth is sought
in the first place” (Sen, 1997, p. 1960). Emphasizing that human beings are not merely means
of economic production, Sen (1999) reorients human capital discourse to human capability that
could bring about social change beyond economic growth.
Positioning STEM education in light of critical transdisciplinarity is a way forward for coun-
tering instrumentalism and narrowly defined ideological forces that emphasize human capital.
Our review shows that, left unchallenged and unquestioned, capitalist, nationalist and militaris-
tic ideologies can co-opt and orient STEM education toward instrumentalist (Higgins, 2008)
rather than aesthetic purposes (Dewey, 1934; Farris & Sengupta, 2016). An aesthetic education
can help us see more rather than merely seeing as (Higgins, 2008). The distinction here is be-
tween a rudimentary form of recognition (seeing as), as opposed to experiencing the richness and
complexity of the situation at hand (seeing more). Seeing more can reveal the “the thorny, the
surprising, the complex” (Higgins, 2008, p. 14), whereas seeing as becomes a case of arrested
perception. In absence of an aesthetic vision, preparation of a STEM workforce then becomes
the overarching goal for STEM education, and the emphasis shifts away from a truly democratic
vision of education. In contrast, as Sengupta et al. (2019) argued, in an aesthetic imagination,
experiencing the thorny, the surprising, and the complex should involve seeing more critically
and historically, echoing similar calls issued by Philip et al. (2018).
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 23)
Our analysis also reveals how bodies of learners are conceptualized in both tacit and explicit
ways. As observed in many studies in our review, bodies of learners were often reduced to sets of
attributes or variables (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status) that shape learn-
ing. The risk of reducing our intersectional histories and experiences to deterministic categories is
the further subjugation of learners and erasure of the heterogeneity of their histories, desires and
experiences by disciplinary apparatus. As Puar (2005) poignantly noted: “difference is encased
within a structural container that simply wishes the messiness of identity into a formulaic grid”
(p. 128). A case to point is that in our current database, no study focused on disabled bodies
or queer bodies and their experiences in STEM education. In aesthetic imaginations of our bod-
ies and histories, silenced forms of embodied mathematical cultures, learnt intergenerationally,
can offer new transdisciplinary contexts and representations (Takeuchi, 2018). Experiences of
gender- and sexuality-based marginalization and resilience could also offer phenomena, contexts
and narratives for fundamentally re-orienting STEM education toward who learners become,
rather than merely focusing on what to learn (Par´e, Sengupta, Windsor, Craig, & Thompson,
2019; Par´e, Shanahan & Sengupta, in press).
It is also important to note that due to the exclusive focus on English-medium publications,
our article does not provide a complete picture of STEM education. It leaves out reforms, policies
and practices that are happening beyond English-speaking countries. Our focus on science and
mathematics education journals also exclude, for example, engineering education journals, where
conversations around STEM education are now beginning to take shape. In addition, the focus
on transdisciplinarity could also be evident in the works that do not use the term “STEM
education” (e.g., the vast body of research on children’s long-term development in science and
mathematics education by Lehrer & Schuable, 2000) that we have not focused on this article.
Despite these limitations, by intentionally delimiting our research, we were able to provide
a rich illustration of key discourse that characterizes the disciplinary hegemony in the field of
STEM education in the decade of early formation, especially in widely-circulated and widely-read
English-medium journals. Our review adds to existing literature reviews on STEM education
(e.g., Belland et al., 2017; Kim et al., 2018; Reinhold et al., 2018), by centralizing the ques-
tions anchored in the notion of transdisciplinarity: how can we mobilize discipline more toward
epistemological and ontological liberation? In this light, our review amplifies the current collec-
tive efforts to push the boundary of STEM education toward a more critical and emancipatory
transdiscipline (McKinney de Royston & Sengupta-Irving, 2019; Sengupta et al., 2019; Vakil &
Ayers, 2019).
Implications for STEM Education Research
Overall, our review suggests that although going beyond a single discipline and “real-world”
complexity are often cited as motivations behind STEM integration, research efforts typically
lack a deep engagement with critical transdisciplinarity. To this end, we believe that the follow-
ing calls to action can offer productive re-orientations for STEM education researchers.
1. Reorient the research foci away from human capital discourse
Our Findings suggested that approximately 40% of the studies focused on students’ inter-
ests in pursuit of STEM-related careers. The meaning and experiences of STEM education for
learners in such studies are thus reduced to the enhancement of human capital. More studies
on what learners are actually learning and what the experiences of STEM learning for learn-
ers are needed, in order to reorient the current discourse of STEM education in a way that
foregrounds the phenomenology of learning and teaching in transdisciplinary contexts (e.g., Vos-
soughi, Hooper & Escud´e, 2017; Sengupta et al., 2019). Such studies can shed light on the
meaning of STEM learning even for students who choose not to pursue postsecondary education
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 24)
in STEM education, and inch us closer to a more democratic imagination of STEM education.
Furthermore, as evident in our analysis, the outcome-oriented focus also does not include young
learners and the elderly and disabled bodies, for example. As we begin to include a more diverse
group of people (beyond the limited scope of normatively defined secondary and postsecondary
students) as learners and participants in STEM discourse, both within and across formal and
informal settings and across the lifespan, we can also begin to develop a richer understanding of
transdisciplinarity in STEM education.
2. Envisage disciplinary and spatial expansions of STEM education research
In defining transdisciplinarity, we emphasized the liberation of discipline to relinquish geo-
political constraints and expand epistemological boundaries. As our findings suggest, most
STEM education research is conducted in the context of the United States. By going beyond
the geo-political boundaries of the US and the ideology of US nationalism and militarism, we
also call upon for broadening our epistemological and ontological frameworks — not merely the
research contexts — in ways that bring into play perspectives from the global South.
We also identified the overreliance on science education defining and situating what should
count as STEM education. In our current database, STEM education was mostly defined by
the disciplinary practices and languages within sciences or science education. The use of certain
technologies such as computational modelling and robotics, and the allusion to “design” mostly
defined interdisciplinarity in STEM education. However, the notion of design was rarely (if at
all) explored beyond the notion of iterative improvement. By limiting the inclusion of other dis-
ciplines such as mathematics, arts, media studies, humanities, social studies and the law and so
forth, our imagination of design and STEM education can be severely constrained. We therefore
call for the inclusion of people, knowledge, and practices in defining STEM learning, beyond the
disciplinary hegemony of science.
3. Focus on emergence generated from transdisciplinarity
We argued that critical transdisciplinarity stands against individualization of multiplicities, in
a sense similar to Foucault’s (1977/2007) problematization of the singularity of “discipline.” We
defined transdisciplinarity as going beyond amalgamation of two or more disciplines, to include
the synergistic and reflexive relationship achieved through dialogues among people, practices,
and constructs from multiple disciplines. What results from such conversations is an emergent
phenomenon, in the sense that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and that disrupts
and challenges the disciplinary hegemony. When multiple disciplines are integrated in practice
with one another, what results are new representational and epistemic practices that advance
each of the constituent disciplines (MacLeod & Nersesian, 2016). Standardizing STEM learning,
on the contrary, can inhibit transdisciplinary inquiries and instead orient us toward reproducing
disciplinary hegemonies. Such reduction of disciplinary practices contrasts with the image of
scientific practice that Pickering (1995) depicted as the “mangle of practice” — “the reciprocal
tuning of human and material agency” (p. 21). The image of STEM education as a boundary
object (Shanahan et al., 2016) invites us to engage in boundary play with disciplinary formations
(Sengupta & Shanahan, 2017). In contrast, the rigidity of standardization without adequate
attention to the role of uncertainty (Duschl, 2008) and heterogeneity (Rosebery et al., 2010;
Sengupta et al., in press) can counter emergent disciplinary excursions (Azevedo, 2013) that in
turn can radically expand our imagination of STEM education.
In a more critical sense, we also positioned queering disciplines at the core of emergence —
questioning, mobilizing, and unsettling the settledness within and across disciplines (Ahmed,
2006). This is an invitation to continue deepening disciplinary practices while also bringing to
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
Transdisciplinarity in STEM Education: A Critical Review (Author version; page 25)
light learners’ bodies, histories and desires, especially in contexts where they have been histor-
ically marginalized. Such forms of critical and transdisciplinary engagement can radically alter
the representational infrastructure that we take for granted in STEM education, and also offer
ideological expansions of what can and should count as disciplinary authenticity (Lam-Herrera
et al., 2019; Philip et al., 2018; Takeuchi & Dadkhahfard, 2019). It is toward such greater imagi-
nations of critical transdisciplinarity that STEM education can orient us, rather than restricting
us to instrumentalist and nationalist discourses and ideological forces.
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Appendix: The List of Journals Selected for Close Review
•American Educational Research Journal
•Computers and Education
•Journal of Research in Science Teaching
•Learning and Instruction
•Cognition and Instruction
•Cultural Studies of Science Education
•Educational Studies in Mathematics
•For the Learning of Mathematics
•Harvard Educational Review
•International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning
•International Journal of Science Education
•Journal for Research in Mathematics Education
•Journal of Mathematical Behavior
•Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education
•Journal of Science Teacher Education
•Journal of the Learning Sciences
•Mathematical Thinking and Learning
•Mind, Culture, Activity
•Science Education
•Studies in Science Education
•ZDM: Mathematics Education
•International Journal of STEM Education
Citation: Takeuchi, M.A., Sengupta, P., Shanahan, M-C., Adams, J.D., & Hachem, M. (in
press). Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: A critical review. Studies in Science Education.
doi: 10.1080/03057267.2020.1755802
