An Introduction to STEMtelling and the Creative Tension of Storytelling in Science

Ten years of STEMtelling — from a high school science activity to a method of ethical awareness

This is a story of a method that I have been building for the last ten years that is grounded in the perspective that science and technology are not neutral practices or bodies of knowledge. Both contain human values, interests, desires, and fears—as they are fundamentally human endeavors. And while a goal of science is to approximate a measure and semblance of objectivity, the practices and decisions that shape science are not separate from the people and institutions that produce them.

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The Origin of STEMtelling

The story of STEMtelling began about ten years ago in a high school classroom when I was six months into being a biology teacher without any formal training in an under-resourced institution, where the average time that a teacher (including myself) taught at the school was two years. We had twenty-year-old textbooks with missing pages, no lab to conduct experiments in, and no budget to use for supplies. All of my students were either Somali or Oromo, whose knowledge, experiences, and culture have been marginalized in science and education.

At the beginning, I taught the way my college professors taught me, and built lessons from free resources I found online and through creative attempts with what I already had at my disposal. One of the interruptions into more procedural science learning that I created was asking students to write short stories about the connections between science and their experiences. These stories acted like lenses into their worlds and thinking. From these stories, I created lessons that were based on what the students were interested in: superheroes in comic books experiencing evolution, cellular changes when playing football or basketball, and what goes on behind the scenes of manufacturing cosmetic products.

In my second year of teaching, I continued to make modifications to improve this storytelling activity’s design and pedagogy. I even had a name for it: STEMtelling. The following year, I left this high school and enrolled in a master’s program for teaching and learning. Throughout my studies, STEMtelling was still in the back of my mind. One of my instructors invited me to teach STEMtelling to our class. Years later, he still uses it with his students to explore variations of identities within science.

I would put STEMtelling down and revisit it when there was an interruption that called for it, like teaching a new course, meeting new people to collaborate with, or reading a book that prompted me to think about STEMtelling in a different way. Each iteration became a new opportunity to redesign and rethink. There was something that felt unfinished yet held my attention and curiosity. For a couple of years, I competed in pitch competitions and incubation programs in the EdTech startup world, thinking this would be the structure that would allow for more interactivity. Although, that turned STEMtelling into something distant and transactional, when I wanted it to be relational and philosophical.

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The Theory of STEMtelling

In graduate school, my advisor, a philosopher of science, challenged me to consider how STEMtelling could be a part of science. Sure, it was an activity that could be used in a science class, but how was it a practice of science? This led to other questions like, what determines a science story? How can STEMtelling be a practice of producing collective knowledge? I turned to philosophers of science, such as Helen Longino and Isabelle Stengers, who both argued for a different approach to making scientific knowledge. Longino argued that knowledge becomes objective not because it originates from a neutral position, but because it is produced through a community that has values and engages in critical discourse and through practices of intersubjectivity. Stengers advocated for a practice of slow science (as opposed to fast science that favors publication and corporatization), as good research, creative thinking, and meaningful discovery take time.

I put Longino’s ideals of social knowledge and Stenger’s concept of slow science to use as the foundation of STEMtelling. After a few iterations of STEMtelling, I began to redesign other elements of the practice. The prompts were triangulated to the learning objectives, student lives, and relevant social or ethical considerations (for example, one prompt asked students to author a story about a technology that transformed an environment in a place that they care about). I also learned through many failed attempts that STEMtelling became more relational when people read out loud to each other. The process of reading out loud, being heard by others, and having something reflected back to the self by the audience allowed for change. In such exchanges, similarities and differences surfaced naturally, and showed how we make sense of ourselves and the world through multiple experiences and paradigms.

In some examples from an undergraduate environmental science course, students wrote about their relationship to biodiversity and their family. One student named Alex wrote about growing up between two worlds—a dad in a city and a mom on a forty-acre farm: “In the city, I often spent time around Camel Lake, not thinking much about the water or the animals around me. In the urban landscape, the natural world was harder to access [...] On the farm, I remember playing in the garden often. My sister and I would play in the ravine, searching for small toads and insects. We would find them, hold them, and let them go. Sometimes we would save the ones that fell into the window wells. We would build forts out of tall grass, and line the ground with different types of moss [...] I knew that I was not alone out there, but in harmony with many other living things.” Alex went on to describe the farm, which was a few miles from the Prairie Island Native Community, one of two nuclear power plants in the state sitting on the reservation. They connected their STEMtell to issues of land, power, and injustice: “Despite the health and vitality of the place that I lived, one of two nuclear power plants in the State sits on the reservation, actively threatening the health and well-being of the Dakota people of the land, as well as the wildlife and habitats that surround the area.”

In a different STEMtell, Emily investigated a spare tire in her backyard that had been sitting long enough to develop its own small ecosystem: “Deciding to take a closer look, I wandered closer. There was a pool of water, and in that water were microorganisms. Fascinated, I took a picture and a video of what I found. The microorganisms moved around nimbly from one end to another [...] I realized that smaller lives like microorganisms fascinated me because it is not common for me to see them, and when I do, it is cool because there are smaller living creatures like this living on this planet with me.” Emily hadn’t realized just how much she cared about microorganisms until she wrote about them.

In each of the STEMtells, the act of constructing the story surfaced knowledge and interest that had been there, unnamed, and waiting for a form. When the story was shared in the group, something else happened. Her classmate Alex relayed this to Emily later: “I was at the lake the other day, and I was looking at the water and thinking about life, because there was like an algal bloom that was growing. And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, thinking about Emily and how she just looks in the water and likes to see these tiny, tiny little things that are going on.’ So I’ve been thinking about not just looking at what’s right in front of me, but wanting to get more curious about the tiny, tiny things.” When Emily heard this, she said: “I didn’t realize I had such an interest in microorganisms until you all said this.” At this moment, they were creating a new understanding and reflecting that back to each other. The STEMtells that they were creating were changing their beliefs about themselves and each other in the context of science.

Lake found in similar ecosystem that Emily and Alex wrote about while STEMtelling

One of the final steps of STEMtelling is asking students to reflect on it as a practice. One student described how STEMtelling changed their ideas about themself and their relationship to science. Maya wrote: “It made me realize how connected science is to all aspects of my life. Science is not just labs and test tubes, it is in the food we eat, all the classes we take, and all around us in nature.” Another student talked about how STEMtelling challenged more conventional ideas about science: “STEMtelling fosters community and vulnerability, in a field that often dismisses lived experience and non-scientists as those who can produce knowledge, challenging dominant systems of oppression which OBVIOUSLY play out in the classroom.” Finally, another student wrote: “I don’t think my attitudes about science changed, but I’m just more aware of science in my surroundings. Every time I go outside now, I notice things more. I pick up things more. Because of the stories, it gives me ideas like, ‘Hey, maybe I should look at this one. I wonder what it is?’ It helps with curiosity. It’s just a little fun in my life.”

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STEMtelling as a Practice of Relational Ethics

From the environmental science classroom, I took STEMtelling to an undergraduate machine learning course for engineering students, where the instructor invited me to adapt STEMtelling for students learning about AI ethics. The framework remained the same. It was only the prompts that were tailored to suit more contemporary ethical associations with AI: Author a story about a time when you shared your personal information (i.e., signing up for an app) and you weren’t sure what was happening with that information; Author a story about a time when a friend or a family engaged with inaccurate (and possibly biased) output generated by a large language model (LLM).

In response to the previous example prompt, Joya wrote about how she attempted to generate an image of herself using a chatbot that produced an image of a man instead. She wrote: “At first, I laughed. Then I thought about why this happened. Nowhere had I mentioned my gender, yet the AI had assumed I was male. Was it because I study engineering? Because I code? Probably. Yes, duh.” At the end of the semester, Sunil reflected on how STEMtelling was making him understand differently how LLMs were shaping his view of the world: “Before, I saw AI as mostly a tool that just responds to prompts, but now I realize how much it shapes what we see and how we think. Whether it is targeted ads, recommendations on social media, or even misleading summaries, AI is influencing us all the time.”

Ethics is often presented as a moral binary of good versus evil. Yet, the kind of ethical awareness in STEMtelling develops from a practice of discernment. The participants perceived the effects of the systems they were being trained to both build and use more clearly. As Rin described, “While reading our STEMtells, we saw many similarities—specifically on the accuracy of large language models. For instance, in Xena’s story an LLM generated a false report of a medical article, while in mine, an AI model incorrectly made predictions based on facial features of individuals. We also saw that we both had similar experiences with data sharing and data access of social media algorithms and mobile applications—where our data was being used without our knowledge to tailor suggestions to our needs.” What emerged is a deeper understanding of how algorithms work that is less about individual choices and more about how algorithmic systems are structurally designed.

The ethical thinking that is situated in STEMtelling demonstrates a relational approach centering the connections between people as a foundation for moral thinking, rather than starting from abstract rules, individual rights, or universal principles. The core idea is that we are fundamentally relational beings—our identities, well-being, and moral lives are shaped by our connections to others.

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What comes next?

Working on this project has been about designing, listening, naming, mapping, reading, redesigning, researching, philosophizing, and speaking with students, professors, science teachers, artists, designers, philosophers, friends, and family. Everybody who interacted with it took some part in creating how it became a practice of ethical awareness. And, maybe STEMtelling landed as a practice of ethics because those are the questions that people are asking, revealing the kinds of stories and methods that matter right now.

Thus far, STEMtelling has been taken up as a way to build a collaborative and creative community in both formal and informal learning environments and in research groups. It becomes a practice of building an epistemic culture, and highlights the creative tension of what counts as science and how we make scientific knowledge, while challenging us to think critically and carefully about what and whose knowledge matters.

For those who are curious to try it, STEMtelling functions as a practice (not a solution) to transform any community with stories. If you are a teacher, the prompts are adaptable to any learning objective. If you work within a group in which knowledge is made collectively, the epistemic culture structure travels outside of formal classrooms to become a legitimate starting point for inquiry, and a method for what it looks like to build knowledge through stories. If this reaches you and you want to try it—in your classroom, your lab, or your community—feel free to reach out for instructions that you can adapt to how you want to personally use STEMtelling.