The climate crisis raises questions such as: Why are corporations continuing to produce plastic for their products when more sustainable solutions are available? Does recycling make a difference? Can oil companies be "green" and "sustainable," as their ads claim? Why are factories, landfills, and extraction sites located where…

In Fall 2016, the School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) chartered the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) initiative. NEET aims to educate young engineers to build the new machines and systems that will address societal needs of the 21st century. Students enter NEET in their sophomore year and join…

The Walls Project encourages educators to broaden management teaching beyond individual and organizational variables and outcomes to systemic variables and outcomes. Its focus is on discovering independent variables that have social and environmental impacts and are currently neglected. Founded by six individuals who met at a RMLE UnConference in…

Equity has often been identified as a foundational concept for truly inclusive and reciprocal partnerships among schools, families, and communities. Equity can be difficult for schools to achieve without cultivating new paradigms for interacting with historically marginalized students, families, and communities. In order to bridge the ideal of…

Historically, deep learning opportunities have occurred in schools attended by this country's most advantaged students, and there have been few successful efforts to systemically create the structures and policies necessary to ensure every student has access to this type of learning. The New Tech Network, a network of more than 200 elementary,…

Part One of this article ("Technology and Engineering Teacher," 75(4), December/January, 2016) presented a process that science, math, engineering, and technology teachers could use to collaborate and design integrated STEM courses. A conceptual framework was discussed that could provide a premise that educators interested in delivery of…

In this first of a two-part series, the authors report that STEM is still mostly science and mathematics, taught separately with little or no attention to technology and engineering. Where connections do get made to technology and engineering, too often they happen through several disconnected projects that lack coherence in content standards and…

This article contributes to the growing social realist literature in the sociology of education. A world systems approach is used to explain the shift to the various forms of localisation, including the emphasis on experience in the curriculum, as a strategy of globalisation that contributes to the decline of universal class consciousness and…

The System Dynamics approach can be seen as a new way of understanding dynamical phenonema (natural, physical, biological, etc.) that occur in our daily lives taking into consideration not only single pairs of cause-effect variables, but the functioning of the system as a whole. This approach also provides the students with a new understanding in…

The routine jobs of yesterday are being replaced by technology and/or shipped off-shore. In their place, job categories that require knowledge management, abstract reasoning, and personal services seem to be growing. The modern workplace requires workers to have broad cognitive and affective skills. Often referred to as "21st century…

Professors in management and business are encouraged to incorporate critical thinking as an objective in their courses. "The Lobster Tale" provides an opportunity to engage students in various levels of critical thinking, ranging from a relatively superficial reading to an examination of the deeper, often hidden issues. Using the foundations of…

Based on the recommendation of the AAAS and the NRC, middle level science is the rightful introduction for a systems approach, including the study of its parts, subsystems, interconnections, and interrelationships. Dr. Seuss's "The Lorax" provides an excellent opportunity to combine ecological consequences within a systems approach (Sweeney 2001).…

Presents a schema for expert decisionmaking that can be used as a performance support tool. The ringshaped schema can be used in two ways: (1) beginning at the center with problemsetting and working outward to other supporting factors, or (2) skimming over the factors located in the outer ring to find a topic related to information about the…

An experimental interdisciplinary freshman course taught at North Carolina State University was intended to introduce principles of general systems theory; to provide examples through lectures and readings of applications of these principles in a wide variety of fields; and to introduce and provide practice in critical questioning and evaluation.…

Describes bibliographic instructional design, a method that combines the systems approach of instructional design with the behavioral taxonomy approach. Highlights include integrating affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor objectives; and three levels of information literacy, including critical thinking, using information retrieval knowledge, and…