Year: 2026
Type: article
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. Context and implications Rationale for this study: Critiquing the leaky STEM pipeline metaphor, we present STEM stories and a montage of two women and a man returning to STEM late in life. Why the new findings matter: 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. Implications for practitioners, policy‐makers and researchers: The implications of this study warrant further research and are potentially of particular interest to policy, for example, the British Government's recommendations to improve ‘the STEM skills pipeline’ (UK Parliament, 2025, p. 1). This research will also be of interest to STEM educators and researchers, who can extend their work by employing late‐onset STEMers and by adopting or adapting the construction of STEM stories and story montages to critique and address issues in STEM education. Above all, this study will provide confidence and encouragement to the general public to return to STEM even after they have long left STEM education.
Source: Review of Education
DOI: 10.1002/rev3.70226
Authors: Saima Salehjee, Mike Watts
Institution: Brunel University of London
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,470
OpenAlex ID: W7212044864