Literacy and STEM Collaborations

In preparation for presenting at a local conference, I have been thinking about how librarians and instructional technologists can collaborate with teachers and connect to both STEM principles and

literacy goals. Helping kids become more literate and teachers achieve the goals of the Common Core State Standards and teacher evaluation standards in our state. The idea here is that integrating STEM and literacy doesn't mean that science teachers must require students to read a book about the weather in an earth science unit or math teachers have to find time for a "history of math/famous mathematician" project in order to have students read something. Librarians can work with teachers to find more creative and authentic ways to integrate reading and literacy into their curriculum. When educators treat literacy like an objective to check off a list then we aren't really helping our students become literate.

So, integrating literacy well is in part is about defining it more broadly. (Although, not as broadly as it is often defined - students can now be math literate, digitally literate, technologically literate, media literate, information literate, scientifically literate, transliterate, phew! It seemed easier when they just had to read.) The literacy I want to develop definitely involves reading and strategies to improve reading but is also taught through writing, speaking and listening. Can your math students explain their thought processes? Can a student learning a scientific concept turn it into a story to embed the concepts in their memories? Can an algebra student teach another student how to do a difficult problem and troubleshoot errors? When students can write and speak about what they are learning, they are becoming more literate. If librarians and classroom teachers can also integrate some authentic reading into what they are working on, all the better.

STEM learning can not be left up only to the math and science teachers, it's important to integrate these skills and learning goals into the humanities - the arts, social studies, and language arts all benefit from integrating core principles of STEM education. Adding a little coding or robotics into a digital storytelling project - what fun!

Bethany Smith and I will be presenting ways to integrate STEM and literacy at the WCPSS Convergence Learning Symposium as well as at the 2014 ISTE conference. We are sharing ideas on integrating reading online, creating with MaKey MaKey, designing with TinkerCad, printing in 3-D, telling stories with Legos and more. We hope to continue to get ideas from participants on how to involve more science and math teachers in the literacy movement, more humanities teachers in the STEM movement and more librarians/instructional tech folks in the collaboration movement.