Supporting transdisciplinary STEAM practices: Integrating architectural modelling into mathematics education through a cross-cultural dynamic lesson plan (DLP) tool

Abstract

This paper proposes a cross-cultural dynamic lesson plan (DLP) tool that could be adopted by teachers across different cultures to implement STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts & Mathematics) education practices. An abundance of well-developed lesson plans is available to teachers on numerous Internet sites, but the cultural diversity of such lesson plans – i.e., difficulty to customize for alignment with local curriculum and lesson plan requirements, make it difficult for teachers to utilize and share these resources – due to the lack of flexible customizations for orientation with local curriculum and lesson plan requirements. This study suggests an approach to overcome such challenges by presenting the DLP tool to assist teachers’ STEAM teaching practices using GeoGebra for learning content elaboration. Our proposed transdisciplinary STEAM practice uses architecture as a real-life example that connects mathematics learning to culture and history through mathematical modelling. This study follows a design-based research approach to develop and implement DLP tool and its related design heuristic. Moreover, the study is examining how the DLP tool can be utilized with teachers cross-culturally and how it could support teachers in professional development workshops to design transdisciplinary STEAM lesson plans. The qualitative analysis of teachers’ artefacts developed during these workshops demonstrated the versatility of DLP tool to address cultural diversity in lesson planning through these STEAM practices applications. The emerging themes from this study show that regardless of participants’ cultures, using the DLP tool to implement transdisciplinary STEAM practices could support teachers in developing operational and shareable lesson plans.