Integrated STEM in Australian public schools: Opening up possibilities for effective teacher professional learning.

Building teacher agency in teaching and learning in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) is recognized as a significant challenge for school education systems in Australia and across the world. Reform initiatives will require substantial changes in how the STEM disciplines are taught at school and in professional learning for inservice teacher education. In this chapter I examine how a qualitative research study in three elementary schools in a large education jurisdiction in Australia used a pedagogical framework and action research to support changes in STEM teaching and learning in classrooms. The findings are presented in a case study, Windows into STEM, which examined how teachers who collaborated in school-based teams increased their subject matter knowledge in multiple subjects as they experimented with new pedagogies that disrupted their beliefs about the enactment of integrated STEM in elementary classrooms