NCSCE brings together scientists, educators, scholars, clinicians, and leaders in communities who can:
- Acquire, organize, and use a variety of resources with which to address real problems – pressing social and global concerns; we are interested in both short-term questions (specific projects) and the exploration of longer-term concerns (such as improving the return on our investments in learning).
- Gather, inspire, motivate, and support students, teachers, scholars, and citizens – and create a bond of community among those people to provide a framework and support for their work.
- Serve as catalysts and brokers in the development of strategic partnerships with other organizations that share our goals and interests.
- Create pathways to support boundary-crossing work (between and among disciplines, but also among administrative divisions, fields of study and inquiry, campuses and communities, and countries); we help people learn, work, and practice together through a sustained focus on real, current problems and themes.
- Empower students by recognizing their value, contributions, and capacities – and by translating our understanding of their power into meaningful engagement with the public and its problems.
- Develop and improve systems and structures that support the work of the individuals and communities we bring together (through, for example, summer institutes and regional meetings, consultations, and visiting scientist program).
- Focus curricular programs on addressing important civic and social goals be they local issues with national and/or international implications, or large issues with particularly interesting and compelling local manifestations.
- Adapt the methods and assumptions of science into the work of teaching, assessment, and evaluation supporting the efficient use of limited resources.
- Serve as a laboratory for the development of a continuum of learning, creating robust connections between high school and college education and between formal campus-based and informal community-based education.
- Describe, communicate, represent, and disseminate the reasons for, nature of, and results of this work.
- Create sustainable scholarly and civic communities to preserve the vision, purposes, and scope of the work we are doing.