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1. Partnering Undergraduate Engineering Students with Preservice Teachers to Design and Teach an Elementary Engineering Lesson Through Ed+gineering

   Gutierrez, K. ; Ringleb, S. ; Kidd, J. ; Ayala, O. ; Pazos, P. ; Kaipa, K. ( June 2020 , 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Online)

   Major challenges in engineering education include retention of undergraduate engineering students (UESs) and continued engagement after the first year when concepts increase in difficulty. Additionally, employers, as well as ABET, look for students to demonstrate non-technical skills, including the ability to work successfully in groups, the ability to communicate both within and outside their discipline, and the ability to find information that will help them solve problems and contribute to lifelong learning. Teacher education is also facing challenges given the recent incorporation of engineering practices and core ideas into the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and state level standards of learning. To help teachers meet these standards in their classrooms, education courses for preservice teachers (PSTs) must provide resources and opportunities to increase science and engineering knowledge, and the associated pedagogies. To address these challenges, Ed+gineering, an NSF-funded multidisciplinary collaborative service learning project, was implemented into two sets of paired-classes in engineering and education: a 100 level mechanical engineering class (n = 42) and a foundations class in education (n = 17), and a fluid mechanics class in mechanical engineering technology (n = 23) and a science methods class (n = 15). The paired classes collaborated in multidisciplinary teams ofmore »5-8 undergraduate students to plan and teach engineering lessons to local elementary school students. Teams completed a series of previously tested, scaffolded activities to guide their collaboration. Designing and delivering lessons engaged university students in collaborative processes that promoted social learning, including researching and planning, peer mentoring, teaching and receiving feedback, and reflecting and revising their engineering lesson. The research questions examined in this pilot, mixed-methods research study include: (1) How did PSTs’ Ed+gineering experiences influence their engineering and science knowledge?; (2) How did PSTs’ and UESs’ Ed+gineering experiences influence their pedagogical understanding?; and (3) What were PSTs’ and UESs’ overall perceptions of their Ed+gineering experiences? Both quantitative (e.g., Engineering Design Process assessment, Science Content Knowledge assessment) and qualitative (student reflections) data were used to assess knowledge gains and project perceptions following the semester-long intervention. Findings suggest that the PSTs were more aware and comfortable with the engineering field following lesson development and delivery, and often better able to explain particular science/engineering concepts. Both PSTs and UESs, but especially the latter, came to realize the importance of planning and preparing lessons to be taught to an audience. UESs reported greater appreciation for the work of educators. PSTs and UESs expressed how they learned to work in groups with multidisciplinary members—this is a valuable lesson for their respective professional careers. Yearly, the Ed+gineering research team will also request and review student retention reports in their respective programs to assess project impact.« less
2. Informal roads as social-ecological-technological systems (SETS): sustainability challenges and impact on landscape transformations

   https://doi.org/10.31489/2021BMG4/144-154  

   Kuklina, Vera ; Petrov, Andrey ; Bilichenko, Irina ; Bogdanov, Viktor ; Kobylkin, Dmitriy ; Krasnoshtanova, Natalia ( October 2021 , Karaġandy universitetìnìn habaršysy Biologiâ medicina geografiâ seriâsy)

   Following the call to mobilize studies of social-ecological systems and sociotechnical systems, the paper presents the case for studying integrated social-ecological-technological systems (SETS), and dynamic systems that include social, natural and technological (engineering) elements. Using the case study of informal roads in the Baikal region, authors of the article argue that re-focusing on SETS creates additional synergies and convergence options to improve the understanding of coupled systems and infrastructure in particular. Historically, transportation infrastructure has contributed to changes in natural and social systems of Northern Eurasia: Transsiberian and Baikal-Amur railroads and East Siberia – Pacific Ocean and Power of Siberia pipelines have been the main drivers of social-ecological transitions. At the local scale, informal roads serve as one of the most illustrative and characteristic examples of SETS. The examination of development and transformation of the informal roads allows exploring the interactions between socioeconomic processes, ecological dynamics and technological advances. The variety of informal roads reflects the importance of specific social, natural or technological factors in the SETS transformation largely unconditioned by policy and regulations thus providing a unique opportunity to better understand sustainability challenges facing infrastructure-based SETS. Relying on interviews and in-situ observations conducted in 2019 in the Baikal region,more »the following factors affecting sustainability of informal road SETS were identified: social (identification of actors involved in location, construction, maintenance, use and abandonment of informal roads), technological (road cover, width, frequency and nature of use by different kinds of vehicles), environmental (geomorphology and landscape sensitivity and vulnerability). The sustainability challenges of SETS development and transformations are found in changing mobility practices, social structure and economies of local communities, increased occurrences of forest fires and development of erosion and permafrost degradation in local environment and push for development of new technologies of transportation and communication.« less
3. Local Knowledge and Democracy in Fisheries Management: A Case Study of Adaptation to the Anthropocene in Southeast Louisiana

   https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11100-240420  

   Lipsman, Jacob E. ( January 2019 , Ecology and society)

   The onset of the Anthropocene necessitates new forms of environmental planning and management as communities adapt to new ecological realities. Despite the global reach of the Anthropocene, localized adaptation strategies are critical for a successful transition into this new epoch. Within local contexts, inclusive, democratic political processes facilitate complex and effective ecological solutions to social problems resulting from environmental change. Genuine incorporation of local knowledge into the decision-making process is critical to fostering this ecological democracy and building effective adaptation strategies. Coastal systems are important nexus points to investigate the relationship between environmental problems and social processes. Fisheries are a critical piece of coastal systems that sustain local communities and the larger economy. I provide a case study of local adaptation to ecological changes as the State of Louisiana attempts to protect vulnerable communities, infrastructure, and fisheries through coastal planning and management. Louisiana’s fisheries are a critical asset that stand to be significantly impacted by continuing coastal erosion. Like the Anthropocene itself, Louisiana’s coastal erosion crisis is largely the result of human intervention in the biosphere for social and economic purposes. The state’s adaptive response is an ambitious master plan that seeks to rebuild the coast and protect its communitiesmore »and economic interests. Although the plan is ambitious and generally lauded, I argue that the top-down approach the State of Louisiana uses in setting coastal priorities undercuts the plan’s efficacy by struggling to incorporate local knowledge and establish a trusting relationship with coastal stakeholders. Without a genuinely deliberative process that bridges across scales and knowledge systems, the state will ultimately struggle to draw in local knowledge, inhibiting comanagement of local fisheries and potentially undermining the ecological solutions it aims to achieve.« less
4. Investigating Land Use Changes with Development of the Informal Road Networks: Case-Study in Siberia

   Kuklina, V. ; Petrov, A. N. ; Shiklomanov, N. I. ; Yu, Q. ; Bogdanov, V. ( December 2019 , American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2019)

   While researchers of social-ecological systems acknowledge existence of formal and informal institutions affecting social-ecological governance, the role of informal sector in the land use change remains understudied. Moreover, existing studies of informal land use are focused mostly on urban areas, such as informal settlements. We argue that the remote regions would be another important area for inquiries. Informal, e.g. unobserved by official records, land use changes there are related to high-speed dynamics of resource extraction projects and location mostly in the regions of traditional land use practices of indigenous people. In particular, we focus on informal roads, which in the Arctic and Subarctic remote regions often remain understudied due to their small size, chaotic, temporal or even seasonal nature, private ownership or traditional subsistence functions. Despite their absence on official maps, they have significant social, economic and environmental impact on local, predominantly indigenous, communities. The study area: the north of Irkutsk region and Republic of Buryatia that the last decades has undergone rapid changes of traditional way of life of "old settlers", native Buryats and Evenks, collapse of the Soviet economy, development of oil and gas extractive industries and infrastructure, environmental regulations to protect the Lake Baikal and tourism development.more »The data was obtained in 2016-2018 at the municipal and local levels using interviews, observations, statistics and cartographic tools. As a result, we identified formal and informal elements of transportation infrastructure with common set of characteristics (e.g. time of development; purpose; present conditions; changes in location; use) and distinguished the specifics of their maintenance requirements, the forms of ownership, seasonality and local traditions. The future plans to use remotely-sensed data, coordinated visual mapping sessions, and field studies for understanding land use changes due to development of informal road networks will be discussed in the presentation.« less
5. CyVerse: a Ten-year Perspective on Cyberinfrastructure Development, Collaboration, and Community Building

   Swetnam, T. L. ; Walls, R. ; Devisetty, U. K. ; Merchant, N. ( December 2018 , AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts)

   Adoption of data and compute-intensive research in geosciences is hindered by the same social and technological reasons as other science disciplines - we're humans after all. As a result, many of the new opportunities to advance science in today's rapidly evolving technology landscape are not approachable by domain geoscientists. Organizations must acknowledge and actively mitigate these intrinsic biases and knowledge gaps in their users and staff. Over the past ten years, CyVerse (www.cyverse.org) has carried out the mission "to design, deploy, and expand a national cyberinfrastructure for life sciences research, and to train scientists in its use." During this time, CyVerse has supported and enabled transdisciplinary collaborations across institutions and communities, overseen many successes, and encountered failures. Our lessons learned in user engagement, both social and technical, are germane to the problems facing the geoscience community today. A key element of overcoming social barriers is to set up an effective education, outreach, and training (EOT) team to drive initial adoption as well as continued use. A strong EOT group can reach new users, particularly those in under-represented communities, reduce power distance relationships, and mitigate users' uncertainty avoidance toward adopting new technology. Timely user support across the life of a project,more »based on mutual respect between the developers' and researchers' different skill sets, is critical to successful collaboration. Without support, users become frustrated and abandon research questions whose technical issues require solutions that are 'simple' from a developer's perspective, but are unknown by the scientist. At CyVerse, we have found there is no one solution that fits all research challenges. Our strategy has been to maintain a system of systems (SoS) where users can choose 'lego-blocks' to build a solution that matches their problem. This SoS ideology has allowed CyVerse users to extend and scale workflows without becoming entangled in problems which reduce productivity and slow scientific discovery. Likewise, CyVerse addresses the handling of data through its entire lifecycle, from creation to publication to future reuse, supporting community driven big data projects and individual researchers.« less