A Critical Examination of STEM: Issues and Challenges (Sociocultural, Political, and Historical Studies in Education)

This critical examination of STEM discourses highlights the imperative to think about educational reforms within the diverse cultural contexts of ongoing environmental and technologically driven changes. Chet Bowers illuminates how the dominant myths of Western science promote false promises of what science can achieve. Examples demonstrate how the various science disciplines and their shared ideology largely fail to address the ways metaphorically layered language influences taken-for-granted patterns of thinking and the role this plays in colonizing other cultures, thus maintaining the myth that scientific inquiry is objective and free of cultural influences. Guidelines and questions are included to engage STEM students in becoming explicitly aware of these issues and the challenges they pose.

Chet Bowers has taught at the University of Oregon and Portland State University, and was granted emeritus status in 1998. He has also written 20 books on the cultural and linguistic roots of the ecological crisis and four books on the cultural transforming nature of the digital revolution.