Abstract
Teachers nowadays face unprecedented challenges. The world is in a constant flux driven by enormous socio-political changes, trends of globalization, massive worldwide immigration, and rapid emergence of life-altering technologies. Consequently, there is a growing expectation that educators equip students with adequate skills. This requires that the twenty-first century science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers re-examine their teaching philosophies, keep abreast with the discipline content, and incorporate digital technology in their pedagogical practice. These expectations present significant challenges to teachers, who are often asked to implement novel (technology-rich) pedagogies they did not have a chance to experience as students or become comfortable with as teachers. To exacerbate the problem, the twenty-first century teachers function in a frequently changing educational reality manifested by continuous curriculum reforms compounded by the avalanche of often contradictory and competing demands from the legislators, administrators, parents, and students. This book brings together researchers from Israel and Canada to discuss the challenges faced by today’s teachers and teacher-educators, in order to suggest possible ways to break the vicious circle of reforms through supporting STEM teachers on a lifelong path of professional learning. The contributions to this book are informed by (a) the latest research findings, (b) current pedagogical trends and practices in the two countries and elsewhere, and (c) ways, in which teacher education and professional development of STEM educators respond to these challenges. The book chapters cover a range of projects—from classroom-based to national initiatives; research methods—from action research and mixed-methods, to conceptual analyses; and technology applications—from social media and robots, to subject-based software.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge Halbert Centre for Canadian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for supporting a workshop entitled “Teachers and Teaching in the Era of Change,” from which this book originated. Thanks to the Centre’s support, in February 2018, we were able to bring together Israeli and Canadian educational researchers, teacher-educators, policy-makers, and secondary teachers who have been grappling with issues discussed in this book for a long time.
The goal of this 3-day Israeli-Canadian workshop was to establish collaboration between Israeli and Canadian educators and produce a book that will address our guiding questions. The workshop had 33 participants: 26 from Israel and 5 from Canada. All these individuals influenced what is presented in this book and some of them contributed chapters. We had two open plenary talks (by Canadian and Israeli speakers), and concluded the workshop with the session that allowed us to brainstorm and discuss how we can best disseminate the outcomes of the workshop and what areas might be fruitful for continuous collaboration.
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Ben-David Kolikant, Y., Martinovic, D., Milner-Bolotin, M. (2020). Introduction: STEM Teachers and Teaching in the Era of Change. In: Ben-David Kolikant, Y., Martinovic, D., Milner-Bolotin, M. (eds) STEM Teachers and Teaching in the Digital Era. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29396-3_1
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