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Q&A with course educators

All courses from the National STEM Learning Centre provide an opportunity to ask detailed questions to the course educators through our Q&A steps
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LIZ PAINTER: Hi my name’s Liz Painter. And I just want to welcome you to this video, and thank you for joining in with the course Linking STEM curriculum learning to careers. So we’ve had two questions that came in on the Q&A session from Saphan. I’m going to answer each question in turn. For the first question was, what are some of the legal and ethical issues in regarding STEM career and curriculum development? For teachers aren’t careers advisors. However, the ethical codes that cover the professional behaviour of careers practitioners can offer us some guidance. Now in the UK this is called the Code of ethics. And one principle is equality.
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For us teachers we should work towards removing any barriers such as prejudice, stereotyping or discrimination. Never assume your students can’t or won’t be interested in a certain career or industry sector. It’s our job to broaden their horizons, raise their aspirations and provide their parents with the information needed to help them make good decisions. In terms of legal issues in the UK all students must be made aware of all the transition pathways available to them, and the classroom teacher does have a part to play in sharing this information. So for example, college courses, University courses or apprenticeships. So make sure you know all the study routes that are linked to your course.
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Say for example A-levels or the new vocational T-levels in the UK, apprenticeships as well as traditional degree courses at University.
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Now the second question from Saphan was asking about the cultural and religious factors and how the implementation of STEM careers in the school syllabus may be affected by these. Now this is a very complex question that I did some thinking about because I haven’t had much experience of this in my own teaching. But again I was mindful of the code of ethics for careers practitioners and had a look at that. So we must be aware that during adolescence a person will be exploring their own ethical, moral and cultural and religious beliefs. And they may be making comparisons between home and school and their social network.
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So as teachers part of our role is to provide them with a space to help them with this exploration. So again guided by the code of ethics that many careers practitioners in the UK adhere to. The following principles can help us with this question, we should encourage our young people to have autonomy to be able to make their own decisions. And we should be impartial and not let external pressures or factors influence or compromise the career learning activities we provide within our lessons. So I hope some of these points have been useful for you and your thinking about the wider issues with career learning we do in our STEM lessons.
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And I just want to point out that there are other courses available in FutureLearn that may be useful to you to link to your practice. So I do encourage you to go and have a look at what else is available. Thank you.

All online CPD courses from STEM Learning provide an opportunity to ask the educators more detailed questions as part of the course Q&A session.

The course educators will record responses to your outstanding questions from your reflection grids and course discussions. If there are ideas from the course you wish to explore further or issues about your own teaching context, then the Q&A provides a final opportunity to explore these with expert insight.

Post your questions

Post your outstanding questions from your reflection grids and course discussions to the comments below by 4 December 2020. The course educators will record responses and upload a video by 18 December 2020.

If your access to this course expires before we are able to upload the video, you can access the video at a later date via the STEM Learning YouTube channel.

Please note: if you post a question here it may be featured in the video recording along with your first name. The recording will be publicly viewed via this step and may also be uploaded to the STEM Learning YouTube channel.

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Linking Curriculum Learning to STEM Careers

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FutureLearn - Learning For Life

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