Welcome to NC-FEW
Worldwide, there has been growing interest in research, education, and discourse around the Food-Energy-Water-Nexus (FEW-Nexus), which serves as a framework to describe and aid in addressing complex coupled human-natural systems and the most significant global challenges of today and tomorrow. These challenges provide a rationale for sustained, systemic, and interdisciplinary educational efforts focused on food, energy, and water systems in a wide array of educational contexts. The National Collaborative for Research on Food, Energy, and Water Education (NC-FEW) is an emergent, transdisciplinary community of educators and education researchers from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and food, agriculture, natural resources, and human sciences (FANH) fields. Through community-building activities, NC-FEW promotes cross-fertilization between participants from diverse disciplinary and departmental backgrounds through sustained network- and capacity-building over multiple years. This community-building endeavor is grounded in the fundamental assumption that NC-FEW can intentionally emerge as a networked improvement community through which to systemically foster and understand STEM and FANH teaching and learning about the FEW-Nexus.
Synthesis of NC-FEW Efforts and Outcomes: 2019-2025
As a culmination of the 2019-2025 NSF grant-funded period for NC-FEW, this synthesis report includes an introduction that sets up the need for NC-FEW, central NC-FEW activities, the NC-FEW vision for FEW Nexus-based education, stories from each of our working groups, research and practice briefs that were presented at the 2025 NC-FEW conference, our experiences fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, and recommendations for future practice and educational research in the FEW Nexus. The aim is for this document to serve as a durable record that documents the work of the collaborative during this period and as a resource to others interested in FEW Nexus-based education and/or interdisciplinary collaborative networks.
Synthesis of NC-FEW Efforts and Outcomes: 2019-2025 (Acrobat (PDF) 12.3MB Sep25 25)
Suggested citation: National Collaborative for Research on Food, Energy, and Water Education. (2025). Synthesis of NC-FEW Efforts and Outcomes: 2019-2025. https://serc.carleton.edu/nc-few/index.html