STEPWISE[edit]
'STEPWISE' is the acronym for 'Science and Technology Education Promoting Wellbeing for Individuals, Societies and Environments.' It is a research and development project based on the STEPWISE framework, which integrates major categories of learning outcomes - including STSE - and relates all of them to 'WISE Activism.' In WISE Activism, students use their literacy in science and technology to try to bring about improvements to the 'wellbeing of individuals, societies and environments' (WISE). Students might, for example, use their knowledge about nutrition and issues relating to for-profit food manufacturing, along with data from their own inquiries into eating habits of students in a school cafeteria, to lobby the school administration to improve the nutritional value of foods on offer in the school.
The STEPWISE framework implements some important educational principles, including:
Educate all students to the best of their ability;
Address relationships among different learning domains (e.g., Skills and NoST Education);
Encourage student self-determination (e.g., via student-led science inquiry &/or technology design projects);
Provide students with an apprenticeship that enables them to develop expertise for knowledge construction, dissemination and use in addressing important personal, social and environmental problems;
Educate students about negative, as well as positive, aspects of the nature of science and technology and relationships between them and societies and environments; and,
Encourage and enable students to take actions to address socioscientific issues; which implies that they use their literacy in science and technology (re: elements of STEPWISE) for improving the wellbeing of individuals, societies and environments.
An important research goal/finding is that:
educators should help students to develop expertise for knowledge construction, dissemination and use in the context of WISE Problems [3] (i.e., problems regarding the wellbeing of individuals, societies and environments);
doing the above may encourage and enable students to conduct science inquiry and/or technology design projects that explore possible WISE Problems;
findings from students' WISE-oriented projects may serve as great motivation for addressing WISE Problems; more so than from STSE Education, since student-led science inquiry and/or technology design projects provide students with personal engagement in 'phenomena representation' dialectical relationships.
You can learn more about STEPWISE, including how to get involved in it, at: [4].
A forum for discussing STSE (socioscientific) issues and actions is at: [5]. This forum contains a 'community-reviewed' journal; that is, the Journal for Activist Science & Technology Education.