The role of teachers’ experiences and beliefs in the conceptualization of mathematics within the design of STEAM activities

In this paper, we study the role that secondary school mathematics teachers attribute to mathematics in the design of STEAM activities for their students. We focus on the description of the design process provided by four mathematics teachers during semi-structured interviews. We triangulate data by investigating teachers’ beliefs about mathematics by means of a written questionnaire. We found that previous experiences in professional development programs enable all four mathematics teachers to play a leading role in the design of STEAM activities. Consequently, in all four cases, mathematics has a focal role with respect to the other subjects. A crucial difference among the teachers is that only two of them have some experience in designing interdisciplinary activities and take into account the epistemological peculiarity of mathematics as a lens to model reality and understand the world. This difference influences their conceptualization of mathematics in the design of STEAM activities.