Collaboration among academe, industries needed to prepare teachers, students for 4IR

CEBU CITY — With the emergence of 4th industrial revolution (4IR), the academe and industries have to collaborate to prepare teachers and students for the disruption that will occur.

Terence Ang, program director of Unilab Foundation, cited the need for the government, academe and industry to work together for the advancement of STEM.

“We collaborate to bring about economic benefits to our people and usher development,” Ang said.

He said this could be achieved by establishing the STEM Leadership Alliance in the Philippines.

“Basically, we’re pushing that education and industry work together so that we could come up with necessary collaboration, come up with programs to increase the competencies of our students,” said Ang.

This could be achieved by providing opportunities to students to work in industry so that they could understand better what the industry needed, he explained.

According to Ang, industry also needed to come up with programs and materials to upskill both teachers and students.

Read more: First Integrated STEM Leadership Summit in Asia set Friday

At the recently concluded First Integrated Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Summit in Asia, speakers stressed the need for the upskilling of teachers so they could help equip students of the competencies they need for future jobs.

Kelly List Wells, founder and executive director of STEM Leadership Alliance (US), cited the need to address the need to promote Integrated STEM.

Wells encouraged summit participants to become ambassadors for integrated STEM.

“You’re all part of something that is magical and amazing. You’re part of this journey. You’re part of the conversation,” she told summit participants.

Wells also encouraged them to reach out to others to make them understand the importance of integrated STEM.

For his part, Titon Mitra, resident representative of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Philippines, noted that STEM should be about providing students with the tools  to address issues of global importance and not just about connecting classrooms to careers.

Mitra also called for the inclusion of entrepreneurship in the curriculum as a way to encourage creativity.

He said that young people nowadays wanted to do many different things, rather than stay long working for a company.

“And many are motivated to challenge themselves to run a business. That’s the issue with STEM. If you could tap the innovation, the creativity and the strong science, technology and mathematics base and link that to entrepreneurship, then you have the potential to create some the breakthrough solutions,” Mitra said.

Having young people equipped with knowledge on running a business offering these solutions would be a powerful force for social change, he added./dbs