EDUCATION OF THE FUTURE: WHAT IS THE STEM-APPROACH

 COULD YOU TELL US HOW THE IDEA OF CREATING THE ASSOCIATION "EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE" CAME ABOUT?

I have a degree in economics, after university I taught for three years and worked in the IT sphere in parallel. Then my partners and I opened our own company, where we were developing mobile applications.

Everything was good, the company grew, developed, but after five years I left, philosophically speaking, in search of meaning. Because I didn't want to go to work anymore and spend the time of my life to make custom products, to implement other people's ideas.

I started doing volunteer work - I organized vocational guidance conferences, consulted on educational projects. People in IT noticed me through this - they had long wanted to create a non-profit organization that would help solve problems with school education. I agreed to do it, because I liked it and had enough expertise in organizing projects. So the Association "Education for the Future" was born. It unites IT companies that are engaged in clever philanthropy and systematically invest in education.

Stem for help

One of the areas of the association's work is career guidance. We invite speakers and hold practical classes, where children can get acquainted with information technology and engineering. Our task is to provide them with information and choices, and then it's up to them.

The second important area is working with teachers. Talking to a child and motivating him to think and analyze is one thing, but talking to a teacher who has 300 such children and possibly influencing his approach to learning is quite another. We hold conferences, master classes, mitaps, and professional development courses for teachers.

While I was in England, a new director came to "Education for the Future" and the direction of the organization expanded - we started to open STEM-classes on the basis of regular schools in small towns of Belarus. Last year we opened 6 such classes, this year we decided to open 10. When we held a competition for these 10 places, we received 250 applications, though we didn't expect such a response. This shows that schools want change and are willing to do something about it.

AND WHEN DID YOU DECIDE TO DO RESEARCH?

After I came back from London and saw these STEM centers, I wondered - do teachers understand what it is? And what can we give them to read about it? I looked around and couldn't find a Russian-language source that would explain what STEM is. There is much more information in English, but it's not always available to the average teacher because of the language barrier.

1. MATH 
2. ARCHITECTURE
3. ENGINEERING
4. PHYSICS 
5. PSYCHOLOGY 
6. CHEMISTRY

And since this is not available, we need to create it. So that's how the idea of the first stage of the study came about - we devoted it to the conceptual foundations of STEM. What it is, where it came from, what challenges it meets, what principles it is based on at the classroom, school, and educational system level.

WHAT SOURCES DID YOU DRAW ON?

We looked at education policy in the States, Britain, academic articles-it gave a cross-section of achievements abroad. After that we held a conference "Current problems of STEM-education," where we invited people from Belarus, who are already interested in this issue: teachers, progressive teachers, the founders of private schools. And we conducted research interviews. We wanted to collect the experience that we already had.

We had a team of four people, we worked hard for two months, then another month was spent on the design, and then another month on the first wave of communication: publications in the media and professional journals, speeches, seminars. I think the output was a very interesting product.

WHAT HAVE YOU COME TO? WHAT IS STEM?

STEM is an approach to education based on the natural connection between the disciplines that are included in the acronym (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths). Science includes physics, chemistry, biology - the natural sciences. Even here there is interdisciplinarity. When we take some phenomenon of the outside world, just look out the window and see, for example, a car driving and pedestrians, there are no labels on them - "this is math", "this is physics", there is a world - complex, complex, interconnected, it is constructed by people, but it is also influenced by the laws of nature. And we want to study it in order to continue to successfully create it. And looking at subjects individually at school, we can go deeper into topics, do analysis, but we lack synthesis. A point of gathering all the ideas about the world together. STEM is designed to solve this problem.