STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education has long been of strategic importance in European countries, and this status has been further reinforced by the European Commission’s 2025 document A STEM Education Strategic Plan: skills for competitiveness and innovation (EU, 2025). This strategic plan seeks to foster national, regional and European-level efforts by positioning STEM education as the strategic pillar in the EU education and skills policy. How do the border regions of Denmark and Germany answer these calls? How does the strategic European-level need for STEM specialists shape understandings of the purpose of school? 

STEM industry represents a multitude of the voices of Biesta & Säfström describe as “educational customers” (Biesta & Säfström, 2023) that are in need of certain skills and competencies. Competence-based education, which often underpins responses industry and workforce demands, is extensively criticized by Moretti and Marabini (2025), for not delivering to their promise to develop the needed skills, for an atomistic view on education, and, crucially, that it perpetuates the existing patterns in the society, and does not sufficiently provide space for critical reflection, transformation and the pursuit for meaningful life. 

As an alternative, collaborative models based on the quadruple helix (Leydesdorff, 2012) offer a framework for facilitating local ecosystems that bring together for co-creation several sectors: education and research, industry, policy, and the society. This transforms the instrumental way of seeing school, and empowers the two-way or multi-way value creation between society and school, a need emphasized by Biesta (2019). However, the logistics and varying agendas can be challenging in these settings. 

The research presented here draws on data generated in the Interreg Germany-Denmark project STEPS which aims to address regional labour shortages by developing education activities for STEM subjects, grounded on authentic industry contexts. Through these educational materials, vocational aspects of potential careers are introduced. In addition, there are added STEM-related aspects of culture and language, to address the Danish-German cross-border cultural learning and potential barriers for mobility. 

Within this setting of educational innovation and development, complex interplays of different contexts, agendas and terminologies emerge. The issue of alignment, cross-sector and cross-border communication through competing agendas is important. This presentation analyses clashing narratives encountered in collaborative innovation, and examines the analytical framing of educational materials, to address the demand for STEM specialists, and to contribute to personal and civic formation, Bildung and the more holistic purposes of education. 

Research questions: 

• RQ1: What narratives, issues and agendas emerge in fostering collaboration between teachers and industries in the border regions of Southern Denmark and Sleswig-Holstein? 
• RQ2: How do these narratives align or misalign with those underpinning European level STEM education policy documents? 
• RQ3: What narratives and terminologies are important for successfully fostering cross-sector and cross-border collaboration? 

The study is grounded in theories of Bildung (Humboldt, 1793/2000; Kivelä, 2018; Klafki, 2000), vocational aspects (Dewey, 2018), the three dimensions of the purpose of education by Biesta (2020, 2022), and the concept of professional Bildung (Hammershøj, 2017). It builds on previous analysis highlighting a particular Nordic context in which teachers strongly identify Bildung as inseparable dimension in STEM education (Characiejiene et al., Accepted), also echoing the work by Sjöström et al. (2017). 

The presentation offers analysis and insights from the ongoing educational development process, framed as Design-Based Research (DBR) (Bannan-Ritland, 2003; Christensen & West, 2017) within the STEPS project. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the initial stages of the design process: exploration, problem identification, and the framing of design direction. These phases are informed by engagement with, on the one hand, theoretical foundations outlined above, and, on the other hand, the analysis of data generated through participatory processes, and initial design iterations. Data are generated by qualitative methods, including qualitative interviews (Brinkmann, 2023), focus groups and dialogical workshops involving project partners, educators, industry partners and other stakeholders in Denmark and Germany. Additional data sources include field notes, meeting documentation, collaborative rapid prototyping, curriculum analysis and feedback on the developed educational material iterations. Through this participatory data generation process, perspectives of several stakeholder groups are captured, including teachers, industry representatives, researchers (developers), local policy makers and experts in STEM education and school-industry collaboration. The data are analysed using thematic analysis (Kushnir, 2025). In addition to the participatory research component, the thematic analysis of national/regional and EU policy documents is conducted, to address research question 2. The study is a work in progress, that informs the subsequent development, testing and communication processes, as well as anchoring of impact within local and extended contexts (Henriksen & Ejsing-Duun, 2022). These methodological approaches are in line with the overarching research focus of the PhD thesis, that aims to capture and bridge the perspectives of different stakeholders in STEM education. In the participatory research methodology, the role of an engaged researcher (Balslev, 2012) is enacted, and the stakeholders – as participants in a triple-helix model (Leydesdorff, 2012) of collaborative innovation process in the project.

This study is a work in progress, and the empirical analysis is ongoing. The research is expected to contribute with insights into the early phases of educational innovation and cross-sector collaboration within an international project context. The analysis will result in implications for both educational development and cross-border collaboration. Tentative findings indicate that teachers connect with the concept of Bildung, notions of academic well-being, and the use real-world contexts that industries can provide. At the same time, their understandings on their role in professional orientation through STEM subjects appear to be contested and negotiated. Preliminary analysis further suggests that in local collaboration contexts, industry actors also approach school-related engagement as also taking the stance of Bildung perspective, and emphasizing character qualities such as courage and curiosity. The importance of situatedness of local collaborative ecosystems, as well as the role of cross-sector facilitators, is an emerging theme that is important to address educational innovation. These actors appear to play an important role in mediating between different agendas, terminologies and expectations across sectors. This work contributes to the efforts to reclaim Bildung in education, originating from German-Nordic contexts, but increasingly extended to broader contexts (Tahirsylaj et al., 2025). In addition, it contributes to research in the field of collaborative innovation in STEM by illuminating the dynamics of cross-sector and cross-border partnerships.

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