Dear Colleagues,

STEM education is more than a simple alignment of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The STEM agenda quite explicitly seeks to ensure a supply of people trained in the technical and technological skills required in certain parts of the economy—the so-called 'industry 4.0'. To this end, STEM has driven significant organisational and pedagogical transformation at all levels of education including a greater emphasis on inter-disciplinary problem-based learning and, notably, an increased use of 'real-world' learning in the context of industry. This makes intuitive sense to educators. The silos of 'science', 'mathematics' and so on are problematic, and calls for better connections between them are long standing. Equally, calls to make the real-world use of scientific/technical knowledge are not new.

On the other hand, the critique of learning designs based on the STEM agenda is now growing with respect to both discursive and organisational change. The STEM agenda, for example, has served to govern ways of thinking and feeling about techno-scientific change in ways that prioritise the needs of global capital over and above alternative discourses available within scientific education such as sustainability. STEM has also been shown to provide cover for false claims of fairness in educational provision and a means for the continued reproduction of a stratified workforce.

This Special Issue will bring together papers discussing how theories of practice might offer productive ways to act in the context of these tensions—and simply to understand what is meant by 'student engagement' within this complex context. These papers will explore how the practices of the STEM disciplines can be imagined to at once support curriculum initiatives that take full advantage of the links with the 'real-world' that STEM has opened up, while also acknowledging the dangers to democratic education that the STEM agenda implicitly creates.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• the implementation of a networked, informal, or semi-formal STEM curriculum that effectively balances the development of skills with the development of the capacity of students to shape their world within and beyond the workplace;
• (new) methodologies for evaluating student attitude and engagement in STEM.

I/we look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Simon Leonard
Dr. JohnPaul Kennedy
Guest Editors

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• STEM
• student engagement
• practice theory
• evaluation