As the Standards' vision has seeped further and further into the fabric of K-12 science instruction, teachers often have experienced considerable dissonance in their attempts to incorporate them into the daily life of their classrooms. What teachers have needed is a coherent instructional delivery system that pulls all the elements together around a common theme, and an efficient means by which they can translate the Standards into practice without having to reinvent the wheel.
EE provides a way to integrate content and skills across the curriculum.
Unlike traditional pedagogy, EE is student-directed students must make decisions about the credibility of their sources, they must learn to analyze issues from more than one perspective, and they must decide whether to act or not. This last component if EE, which stresses problem solving toward specific civic action, is what sets it apart from other forms of science education, and what makes it especially interesting and exciting. Because EE forces students, and teachers, to grapple with social consequences, attitudes, and values, it is also a natural integrator of topics and curricula. EE provides a holistic appraisal of real-world problems, and encourages students to bring to bear the skills and perspectives of many disciplines to create solutions. Although the EE movement has its roots in the sweeping educational reforms of the early 1960s, it wasn't until the Tbilisi Conference, held in 1977 in the Soviet Union, that it began to gather momentum.