We are currently experiencing an unprecedented era in the history of the planet. Our addiction to fossil fuels and powerful technologies is dangerously altering the Earth's natural systems, giving rise to well-documented global crises of climate change, plastic pollution of the oceans, and tragic loss of biocultural diversity. These crises have created a unique challenge for STEM educators, given that STEM disciplinary knowledge and skills are often viewed as the panacea to the world's economic and environmental problems. This popular view tends to focus narrowly, however, on students learning scientific, technological, engineering and mathematical concepts about the world out there, thereby ignoring the crucial role education must play in shaping students' attitudes and values - their inner worlds - that drive moral agency to live and work in sustainable ways. It is moral agency that empowers socially and environmentally responsible citizens to tackle global crises. In this timely book you will read inspiring stories of how professional educators in STEM-related fields have embraced transformative learning and arts education to develop and implement integrated STEAM education programs and practices that are preparing young people with special capabilities and values to actively contribute to the sustainable development of a world in crisis.

The virtual community approach described in this book offers over fifty detailed lesson plans that cover the entire social studies curriculum, while also empowering the emotional intelligence of elementary students. Based on the standards, concepts, information and skills established by the National Council for the Social Studies, the virtual community program accommodates all grade levels and learning styles, providing a template that allows teachers to plug in vocabulary, concepts and skills from local 1st through 5th grade classroom texts. Students collaborate to locate and create municipalities, fictitious cities and towns, in which they build, live, debate, vote, legislate, start up businesses, celebrate histories, brainstorm ideas, engineer innovations, and navigate encounters of everyday life in roles of their choosing. With over a decade of facilitating the program with elementary school students, Lee Chasen presents a theoretical and practical recipe for integrating full spectrum learning with therapeutic agency, a child's natural, inherent ability for seeking emotional balance, to create a rich, meaningful, personalized approach to development that restores the neurological dynamic in which the brain best functions and children love to learn. Part cheerleader, Chasen encourages teachers to take on the program and re-imagine what our schools are capable of.

The Florida Research Ensemble (Ulmer, Revelle, Freeman and Tilson) is an interdisciplinary collaborative arts and research group developing choragraphy, a method of inquiry which applies modernist arts practices and poststructural theory to the design and testing of image as category. The authors argue that image categories functions for networked digital media the way Aristotle's word categories functioned for literate concepts. "Chora" was retrieved for contemporary philosophy by Jacques Derrida, in the context of his deconstruction of Western metaphysics. Grounded in grammatology (the history and theory of writing), Derrida's critique of Being and Becoming as primary concepts of reality is that the category or classification system invented within literacy is not adequate for the apparatus of electracy that has developed since the industrial revolution. The FRE project in Miami designed and tested a prototype for a choral category, capable of coordinating real places, cultural collective information, digital technologies, and personal experience. Miami Virtue tested choragraphy as a method for adopting a particular region (the Miami River), including primary discourses organizing its lifeworld, and articulating it as a category of thought. The designed and recorded virtual site functions for electracy the way concepts function for literacy: as a navigable set supporting holistic intelligence and public discourse.