Creating possibilities: Recent research shows that less than half of Canadian high schoolers graduate with senior level STEM courses

By Joel Wittnebel/The Oshawa Express

For today’s students, the options are endless.

Career paths are numerous, the voices telling them which way to go are plentiful and loud, and making a final decision before 12 years of school are over is sometimes impossible.

Now, Durham educators are doing their best to expose students to every viable option, and they’re starting early. With many students wanting to be doctors or veterinarians, Durham teachers are trying to remind all students that the world still needs more physicists, computer programmers and engineers. In other cases, teachers are preparing students with tools and knowledge, hoping they will be able to tackle jobs that haven’t even been invented yet.

It’s a tough sell, especially for young women who may be intimidated by the fact that jobs stemming from these sorts of STEM courses are dominated by men.

However, in Durham Region, everyone is getting in on the act with industries and local organizations coming together to help foster students into careers that they want and the careers the world needs.

A brief look at the STEM debate

The need for students educated in science, technology, education and math has never been in question, but for years, a debate has swirled as to whether our country will have enough workers skilled in these areas to handle the jobs of the future.

For example, in 2013, the Conference Board of Canada estimated that Ontario could lose up $24 billion annually in economy activity due to this gap in skills.

However, two years later, the Council for Canadian Academies disputed the claim in a report that found “no evidence of a current imbalance between the demand for and the supply of STEM skills at the national labour market level.”

But recent numbers from Let’s Talk Science show that despite the fact that less than half of Canadian high schoolers graduate with senior level STEM courses, approximately 70 per cent of Canada’s top jobs require these types of courses.

Regardless of the debate, one thing is certain, the careers of the future will be heavily based in STEM.

“There’s so much rapid development happening in these areas, you don’t know what the future is going to look like, but we definitely know that it’s science, technology and engineering based, it’s huge,” says Uzma Mustafa, manager of communications, Canadian technical centres for General Motors.

Rules of engagement

When it comes to getting students interested in these types of courses, teachers are sometimes fighting an uphill battle as the complicated subject matter can be hard for young learners to understand and put real-world applications behind.

For that reason, Lisa Lim-Cole, the previous science and technology program facilitator for the Durham District School Board, says the schools are “MacGyvering the classroom”  to provide teachers with more innovative ways of teaching these courses and finding ways to relate these careers with real-world applications and the jobs that come out of them.

“When we think about STEM education for us, it’s always within a particular social context or environmental context or real-world problem,” Lim-Cole says.

And it comes outside the classroom too.

The DDSB’s Future City program, a program that has existed in the United States for 25 years, has students thinking about and designing a city 100 years into the future. This past year the school board’s top team travelled to Washington, DC to compete in the international competition.

Students in the DDSB also take part in the STEM Olympics, which has versions at the elementary and secondary school levels. This year’s version of the event will centre around tackling issues associated with climate change.

However, for Lim-Cole, these events are only one part of the equation.

“I really felt that my role was really about that bigger picture of vision for our board and what it means for our educators in our system to allow for those opportunities for our students and thinking about where our students might end up after they finish school,” she says.

Part of that is giving students a practical vision of just where they could end up, putting real professionals alongside the students to show them, in the flesh, engineers, computer programmers and the like. This is done through partnerships with other institutions like the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, the University of Waterloo and computer giant IBM.

“From a student’s perspective, if it’s not real as a tangible example, then it’s hypothetical,” Lim-Cole says. “I think we really need to put examples of people at the forefront to provide sort of an experience for our students.”

It’s easy for students to imagine what a doctor does or a vet, or even physicists like those popularized on the hit sitcom the Big Bang Theory. However, getting students to think outside those silos and about different careers can be hard.

“From a student’s perspective, if it’s not real as a tangible example, then it’s hypothetical,” Lim-Cole says.

Starting early

One such way to inspire students into careers around STEM is peaking their interest at an early age, something GM has a vested interest in, promoting and funding a number of STEM programs each year for kids of all ages.

“Our belief is that we can’t just introduce it at a university level, you have to start doing it earlier than that,” Mustafa says. “We firmly believe that we’ve got to start young to encourage them and create that excitement around it.”

This is particularly important for young women as data from the Ontario Network of Women in Engineering shows that at the Grade 10 level, the ratio of men to women enrolled is 50/50. However, that number plummets to less than 20 per cent at the university level.

For GM, inspiring that excitement comes in the form of STEM Camps, ongoing since the early 1990s, which, partnering with a number of universities, including UOIT, offers summer camp STEM programming. The automaker also gets involved in the classroom offering A World in Motion programming that provides hand-on engineering activities for kids from kindergarten to Grade 8.

This year, GM estimates that approximately 7,200 students will benefit from their STEM programming initiatives, 50 per cent of them being young women.

And it’s not just about the students, as a new pilot program from GM will see 20 teachers receive education and training and be provided with the tools to ensure they can really bring STEM programming to life in the classroom.

“How can you teach in your classroom and get them excited about a technology when you have no clue what it is?” says Mustafa. “It’s really working with teachers and providing them the tools and the materials so that they can pass that on.”

For Lim-Cole this is a key connection to make sure the passion for STEM can be passed onto students.

“If we don’t empower teachers to be able to deliver those subjects in a way that engages our students because they’re subjects they feel discomfort in, then we have issues there too,” she says.

Hope in Durham

For the past several years, the FIRST Robotics competition has taken over the gyms at Durham College and UOIT. Hundreds of students from across the region and province converge on the campus to run their constructed robots through a set task.

In Whitby, one local team has been on the circuit for more than a decade.

The Where’s Waldo team as they’ve dubbed themselves, is an all-girls team from the Trafalgar Castle School in Whitby. The team has seen many girls at the helm, with nearly 90 per cent of them going on to pursue careers in STEM.

It’s a small representation of the thousands of students getting their young educations in Durham, but with more and more emphasis being placed on these programs, one can only imagine these types of success stories will only become more and more common.