Multi-story building: A montage of STEM success through autobioracy

Abstract

This paper presents a montage of STEM success stories, employing phenomenographic narrative research to gather and present people's lived experiences: their ‘STEM (life) stories’. We chart the experiences of members of the general public as they meet issues of STEM in their everyday lives and coin the term autobioracy, moving away from autobiography, to capture, analyse and showcase our participants' oral accounts. We showcase three such accounts—Carys, Philip and Mehr—to explore their adult re-engagement with STEM after a long prior period of disengagement, that is, after their formal school-based science and technology education. We explore the ways in which they construct assemblages in their descriptions and explanations of the STEM they encounter. We resist a ‘template’ method to the interpretation and analysis of participants' STEM stories and adopt instead a montage approach to narrative analysis, presenting oral stories of events and their descriptions logically, not necessarily chronologically, to illuminate the meaning of their complex, often contradictory and unpredictable ways of knowing and understanding STEM. We position ourselves as ‘entre-deux’ in-between first-person and other-person accounts. Employing autobioracy montage validation, our findings analysed the STEM life stories of autonomy, self-direction, self-aspiration and self-time-lined STEM travellers, who engage in informal STEM learning and enter and leave STEM learning as and when they like. We suggest more empirical research that uses both STEM stories and a construction of montage of these different STEM stories, which senses different pictures and portrayals of the same phenomenon, here the ‘late-onset STEM’ re-entry, across different contexts and phases of life. Moreover, this study proposes a motorway system with no single starting or ending point to address the longstanding problematic perceptions of age and formal education limits.