It's the second week since I got my assignment to one good professor as a research assistant. I had never experienced an elementary class session in the near past, to be precise, here in the US. My assignment for the day was to accompany the professor to a grade 5 class where he is currently collecting data to respond to the urgency of conceptions and perceptions of teachers about integrated STEM in the elementary school curriculum and how this might impact classroom discourse. The day's activity was hands-on, but that wasn't my concern. My conscience was preoccupied with a comparative study; I imagined a grade 5 class teacher trainee I assessed back in Kenya in the year 2020; I did not look at classroom (dis)organization, student numbers, learning materials, or level of rigor. My concentration was on teacher-learner and learner-learner positioning in classroom interactions (Kayi-Ayda & Miller, 2018; Rubbin, 2007). While the new Kenyan elementary school curriculum heavily borrowed from the first economies, there was a jungle of differences between what the teacher and the students embodied in this class before interacting with the learning resources. The teachers' content and pedagogical content knowledge lay a foundation for professional identity, creativity, and the decomposition of the object of learning besides their belief system. The teachers then position themself in the classroom as winners of the student's confidence. The student's beliefs, culture, and ideologies summed up my observations. While they had watched the same videos and given similar instructions, each group used different geometrical shapes to provide tensile support on a bridge. The best groups improvised the over-support in addition to the two recommended under-supports. These students did not look at the technical challenges in designing a bridge but positioned themselves as site engineers and produced different prototypes of bridges. The classroom discourse was organic, and every learner openly shared their challenges, learning points, and what they could do differently next time.
The teacher's conceptions and perceptions of integrated STEM position them in a predominantly productive position in the class. It gives them the impetus to plan, facilitate, evaluate, and learn with the novices. Classroom discourse is not only constrained by teachers' professional disposition but is also by conceptions, perceptions, beliefs, ideologies, and attitudes that enumerate a culture of a people (Holland, 1998). The teacher's positioning as a facilitator, a winner, a point of reference, an authority, a friend, and a co-learner in the classroom builds the student's confidence and the opportunity for grade-level rigor to be supposed (Kayi-Ayda & Miller, 2018).
The triangular shapes increase tensile strength.