Ecologizing STEM education: Measuring and managing for stakeholder empowerment

Abstract

Ecologizing education by situating it in the workplace and other environments in which new learning is applied improves outcomes by structuring personal experiences connecting knowledge and its use. Since 2015, an international movement of formal and informal educators, employers, government offices, philanthropists, and community groups have collaborated to ecologize science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning with the aim of facilitating the creation of otherwise unimaginable future technical and career developments. Ecologizing requires coordinating these groups' activities while they operate at differing micro, meso, and macro levels. Ostrom's theory of participatory social ecologies implies a mathematical model of hierarchically complex relations of data, instruments, and theory. The Caliper measurement system structures the STEM learning ecosystems' communications at these three levels with the aim of maximizing evolutionary potentials, doing so by providing processes of natural selection with opportunities for amplifying innovative new forms of sociotechnical life adaptively integrated with their environments.