Navigating complexity in STEM education

An editorial

Abstract

Complexity is a defining feature of contemporary STEM education, where learners, technologies, curricula, industries, and policies interact in ways that resist simple cause-and-effect explanations. This special issue examines what it means to design for such learning conditions by adopting a complexity perspective that treats educational settings as adaptive systems. In these systems, the central challenge is creating conditions for learning by aligning roles, artefacts, and feedback mechanisms, with coordination emerging as the critical difficulty due to shared responsibility, distributed decision-making, and complex information flows. We frame coordination across three interconnected levels (individual, team, and governance) and argue that effective STEM education depends on orchestration across these levels so that teaching and assessment decisions reinforce rather than contradict one another. The contributions in this issue provide concrete examples of how such orchestration can be achieved in practice, alongside shareable artefacts and design patterns that educators can adapt to their own contexts. By examining diverse cases of coordination in action, this special issue aims to advance research-informed design principles for navigating complexity in STEM ecosystems, offering both theoretical frameworks and practical guidance for educators, researchers, and policymakers working in multifaceted learning environments.