Second, addressing America’s science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) crisis must always include language learning embedded in digital knowledge and skills beginning in the early grades. Many people think that learning science has nothing to do with language or literacy and everything to do with concepts and facts. However, these subjects are accessible only through the language and other symbol systems they use to represent their concepts, content, and practices. And science is not unique–this dependence on language is true of all academic domains and, indeed, most professional domains. Furthermore, different academic domains develop different forms of language and use different sorts of symbols. By the time a student is in high school or college–not to mention a high-tech workplace–the ability to handle complex forms of language and other symbol systems is crucial. It is an entry ticket into the forms of thinking, problem-solving, and knowledge production that are the essences of higher-order skills today.
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During a recent visit to a school I was disappointed because although the school is noted as being a model technology school I was hearing from students, teachers, and leaders that the students had “handed in” a lot of great work, but none of it was being published. Instead their writing, videos, and podcasts lived mainly in obsolescence in a hard to find folder on their various teacher's computers or in obscurity, tattered on a bulletin board sadly with only some educator chicken scratch on it as its insignificant and sole form of commen
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