ABS282 - Activity systems and STEAM: dialogues on building a new curriculum in Science Education

Science Education can be considered one of the most common challenges in the 21st century to improve equity and equality. Taking this fact into account, school education must deal both with the basic knowledge as well as with the decisions about all the possibilities of applying the theories to practice. By proposing interdisciplinary units, the cultural-historical perspective emerges as a possibility to innovate the traditional curriculum, originally separate in specific disciplines. Inspired by the Maker Movement, STEAM proposes an organization of a curriculum in Science based on projects that integrate the Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics. The interdisciplinary nature of STEAM represents a possibility to motivate students towards science learning in order to discuss technical procedures, share information, deal with technology, working in group, develop critical thinking and create solutions for their context problems. From principles of the Activity Theory, this paper intends to analyze the activities of teachers involved in planning and implementing a STEAM curriculum to High School, in a Brazilian private school, finding the contradictions that emerge in that process.
Motivated by students education as the main activity in the system, the tensions and contradictions during the STEAM curriculum planning are related to the option to interdisciplinary education in science or the fragmented education in disciplines, the new students and teachers' roles in the classroom and the classroom’s design to develop projects.
Their negotiations will reveal attributes and changes in practices that can promote the expansion of this local experience for different contexts.