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1. Benefits, Roles, and Tensions: Understanding the Process of Collaboration in Rural Engineering Education Contexts

   Schilling, M. ; Grohs, J. ( August 2022 , 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Calls from regional commissions and research in rural education have emphasized the importance of collaboration to build economic resilience, support communities, and provide students with access to resources for educational opportunities. This study took place in the context of a partnership in a rural, Appalachian region of Virginia focused on providing recurring hands-on activities for middle school students to explore engineering in classrooms with the support of local engineering industry professionals, university affiliates, and teachers. The purpose of this study is to describe how university affiliates explained collaboration using a process framework of collaboration defined around governance, administration, organizational autonomy, mutuality, and norms of trust and reciprocity. Utilizing a single case study methodology, five semi-structured interviews with university affiliates after the second year of partnership were analyzed using a qualitative thematic analysis approach primarily informed by deductive methods and guided by the theoretical framework. Findings from the analysis suggest that university affiliates understood that there are unequal benefits for participating in the partnership, meaning that some partners got more out of the partnership than they might have been able to contribute. Additionally, participants suggested that each partners’ roles and responsibilities were unclear at times, which could have been clarified and strengthened through building relationships and trust among partners. Finally, participants suggested that tensions were present between what teachers were asked to do in the partnership and what might have been required of them by their schools given school expectations around preparation and testing around standards of learning. This research leads to recommendations around building future partnerships and sustainability of partnerships keeping in mind the importance of relationship building and being responsive to the needs of each partner. Additionally, future research could examine specific partnership roles from lenses related to sensemaking and boundary spanning. 

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2. A Program to Engage Undergraduate and High School Students in Community-Based Research

   Bello, K. O. ; Aqlan, F. ; Wood, D. ; Brockman, J. B. ; Marie, H. ; Meyers, K. ; Lapsley, D. ( June 2023 , 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Community-based research (CBR) is a practice that engages researchers in collaborative, change-oriented, and inclusive projects in the community. One common example of CBR is university-community collaboration in which students and researchers come up with ideas, perspectives, and knowledge at each stage of the project with the goal to address community needs. The community is mainly involved in identifying the research questions for the projects and making decisions about how the results of the research-focused projects will be implemented. This paper presents a replication of a model focused on university-community collaboration, student engagement and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) attraction and retention using three research-focused projects addressing community needs. The three projects are (1) empathic design project aimed at improving quality greenspaces and pedestrian streetscape experience, (2) food justice project to study the disparities in food access between local regions, and (3) analyzing water quality in a local creek. The projects provided a unique opportunity for students to directly experience and contribute to the research process. In addition, students worked closely with their academic peers and community partners who served as collaborators and mentors. The study reports on the impact of the program on student learning and tendency to stay back in the community. The program's collaborative nature and its effect on students' satisfaction while working on specific projects are also examined. Furthermore, the program helped develop and sustain university-community partnerships. The community stakeholders participating in focus groups were satisfied with the process of identifying community projects and also expressed their satisfaction with the students’ work. 

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3. A Program to Engage Undergraduate and High School Students in Community-Based Research

   Bello, K. O. ; Aqlan, F. ; Wood, D. ; Brockman, J. B. ; Marie, H. ; Meyers, K. ; Lapsley, D. ( June 2023 , 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Community-based research (CBR) is a practice that engages researchers in collaborative, change-oriented, and inclusive projects in the community. One common example of CBR is university-community collaboration in which students and researchers come up with ideas, perspectives, and knowledge at each stage of the project with the goal to address community needs. The community is mainly involved in identifying the research questions for the projects and making decisions about how the results of the research-focused projects will be implemented. This paper presents a replication of a model focused on university-community collaboration, student engagement and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) attraction and retention using three research-focused projects addressing community needs. The three projects are (1) empathic design project aimed at improving quality greenspaces and pedestrian streetscape experience, (2) food justice project to study the disparities in food access between local regions, and (3) analyzing water quality in a local creek. The projects provided a unique opportunity for students to directly experience and contribute to the research process. In addition, students worked closely with their academic peers and community partners who served as collaborators and mentors. The study reports on the impact of the program on student learning and tendency to stay back in the community. The program's collaborative nature and its effect on students' satisfaction while working on specific projects are also examined. Furthermore, the program helped develop and sustain university-community partnerships. The community stakeholders participating in focus groups were satisfied with the process of identifying community projects and also expressed their satisfaction with the students’ work. 

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4. Launching the Urban STEM Collaboratory

   Goodman, K Ivey ( July 2020 , ASEE annual conference)

   The Urban STEM Collaboratory is a tri-institution collaboration of University of Memphis (UofM), University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver), and Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Each of the three partner universities is embedded in a large city, and serves similar student populations, i.e. students who tend to be first generation, minorities, and/or commuters. These universities encounter similar challenges in first-year retention and graduation rates, especially in the STEM disciplines. As they strive to improve the first year engineering and/or mathematics student experience at their campuses, they have engaged in different approaches; including Peer Led Team Learning (PLTL), formation of an Engineering Learning Community (ELC), and engaging students in outreach as STEM Ambassadors. Incorporating these individual strengths with new activities that will be shared across institutions, the team is currently embarking on a multi-year research project to uncover how students develop STEM identity in an urban context, identify interventions that support this development, and determine the impact that STEM identity has on student success. Through the support of an NSF S-STEM grant, the three universities are also providing scholarships to students engaged in the project. Here, we share the initial efforts of our tri-campus interaction and collaboration, our overarching goals, our systems of recruiting students, and our initial collection of preliminary data and findings for Year 1. 

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5. 'Ilittibaatoksali ''We are working together': Perspectives on Our Chickasaw Tribal-Academic Collaboration

   Fitzgerald, Colleen M ; Hinson, Joshua D ( October 2013 , FEL XVII: Endangered Languages Beyond Boundaries: Community Connections, Collaborative Approaches, and Cross-Disciplinary Research)

   Here we present research resulting from a tribal-academic collaboration between the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program (CLRP) and the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). This collaboration began three years ago, with a UTA service-learning trip to Ada, Oklahoma. The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program is vigorously engaged in many activities to support language use by the remaining 70 or so fluent speakers. Communities facing such stark endangerment must address revitalization and documentation simultaneously, and in a way that maximizes resources. Our partnership addresses this challenge. This paper draws on the principles of Community-Based Language Research, defined in Czaykowska-Higgins (2009: 24) as a model that “not only allows for the production of knowledge on a language, but also assumes that that knowledge can and should be constructed for, with, and by community members, and that it is therefore not merely (or primarily) for or by linguists.” Benefitting from an action-research model, our collaboration supports the Chickasaw community by developing revitalization-driven documentation and training materials for learners that both feed into and are drawn from documentation. Both sides of our collaboration are committed to the transfer of knowledge, especially sharing our findings and knowledge with other endangered language communities. 

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