Towards Culturally Accountable STEAM for Sustainable Heritage Education: Evidence from Mongolian Khoomei Higher Education

Education for sustainable development increasingly introduces scientific tools into living-heritage teaching, risking privileging measurable signals over practitioners’ knowledge. This exploratory sub-study of a broader doctoral project examines a Chinese university Khoomei programme through analytic hierarchy process (AHP) judgements from 10 university-based experts and perception surveys of 75 undergraduates (necessary condition analysis, NCA; fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, fsQCA). Cultural inheritance ranked first (AHP weight 0.4982). Future course planning (NCA ceiling-envelopment d = 0.250) and STEAM-compatible design preference (d = 0.278) showed the largest descriptive ceiling effects for a positively framed single-item overall-support evaluation. At a 70% outcome target, corresponding bottleneck levels (27.5% and 22.9%) denote normalised cohort-specific thresholds, not intervention doses or causal gains. No fsQCA condition reached 0.90 necessity consistency; minimised solutions varied with calibration and crossover choices and describe specification-sensitive exploratory evaluative profiles, not structural pathways. Empirical findings neither demonstrate learning effects nor establish cultural legitimacy. Drawing separately on community-centred heritage ethics, we propose—but do not validate—representational warrant: scientific and digital representations should disclose what they can evidence, what they omit, and whose judgement may contest their interpretation. Institutionally mediated access and supervised surveying leave authority, dependency, and social-desirability limitations unresolved.