Science Technology Society Environment
STSE (science technology society environment) science education is a program of education available since the late 1970s and early 1980s. It can be seen as a minimum of a tool for teaching and learning about STSE issues: e.g., global warming, nuclear energy, acid rain, open-pit mining, nutrition, alternative medicine, and pseudoscience. STSE can also be used as a synthesis of all science outcomes in a curriculum, involving, for example, knowledge, skills and attitudes for separate or combined science, technology, society and environment outcomes. (See, for example, the Alberta Education monograph, STS Science Education: Unifying the Goals of Science Education, available for download below.)
In Alberta the use of the STSE concept is restricted to use as describing the components of a curriculum called curriculum emphases--nature of science (NoS), science and technology (interactions) (S-T), and STSE issues. In this particular case there is a synthesis of the STSE concept with the curriculum emphases concept. This is illustrated in the current high-school science curricula in Alberta and the immediately past and currently present junior-high science curricula. Each unit of science study is associated with one of the three curriculum emphases (NoS, S-T or STSE), so that these outcomes can be handled as systematically and gradually as the pure science outcomes can be. A pedagogic issue is that the outcomes of these three curriculum emphases in the Alberta secondary science assessment instruments are regarded as context rather than content.