An official website of the United States government
Oftentimes engineering design tasks are thought of as acultural and devoid of community inclusion and values. However, engineering design is inherently a cultural endeavor. Problems needing engineering solutions or design thinking are situated in a specific community and need community solutions. This work in progress paper describes initial efforts from a project to help elementary and middle school teachers create culturally relevant engineering design tasks for implementation in their classrooms. To integrate best practices for culturally relevant pedagogy, the engineering design framework developed by UTeach Engineering was adapted to specifically address community needs and cultural values. Changes to the framework also include culturally relevant instructional strategies for classroom implementation. To situate the engineering design steps within a culturally relevant framework questions involving communities and students’ cultural needs, values, and expectations were posed in each stage of the design process. A water filtration engineering design task was situated in the cultural concept of “Mni Wiconi” (Water is life in the Dakota language). This was taught in a summer professional development workshop for a cohort of elementary and middle school teachers, in rural North Dakota, with school districts comprised of large Native American student populations. Teachers adapted this design task for their individual classrooms and content areas (science, math, social studies, ELA) and implemented it in their classrooms in the fall of 2021. Additional support for teachers was provided with fall workshop days aimed at helping them with the facilitation of a culturally relevant engineering task. To integrate culturally relevant teaching and good engineering design tasks, the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction’s Native American Essential Understandings Teachings of our Elder’s website was used. This allowed teachers and students to have firsthand knowledge of how various science and engineering concepts are framed within the indigenous community. Professional development focused on how to situate culturally responsive teaching in engineering design. For example, in one of the school districts the water filtration task was related to increased pollution of a nearby lake which holds significant importance for the local Tribal Nation. In addition to being able to visibly witness the demand for cleaner water, the book “We are Water Protectors” written by Carole Lindstrom, was used to provide cultural grounding for the Identify and Describe stages of the engineering design framework. Case studies of how teachers incorporated the water filtration design task into their lesson plans are presented along with their suggestions on how to improve classroom implementation. Future work in the program includes teachers and their students developing engineering design tasks situated in their own communities and cultures.
more »
« less
Work in Progress: Quality Indicators for Community-Engaged Education, Scholarship, and Research
Academia can engage with communities in a variety of ways, including an education focus (such as service-learning) or geared toward research (community engaged research, CER). These different forms of community engagement (CE) share many elements in common, while other attributes differ. This paper first compares and contrasts educationally-focused CE with CER. We then present a rubric that was developed to evaluate CER in environmental engineering, indicating what aspects are appropriate for community engaged education. The CER rubric proposes nine evaluation categories: centering on communities, capacity building, action-oriented outcome, shared leadership, shared funding, shared data, equitable valuing of CER scholarship, culturally specific assessment, and culturally specific communication and dissemination. For illustrative purposes the rubric is applied to two case studies. In the educationally-focused CE case study, a senior capstone design course in environmental engineering worked on a project defined by a community partner. The rubric did a good job revealing where improvements in the project could have been realized while also revealing that the non-profit facilitator was instrumental in engaging the community. In the second case study, a community sub-contracted an academic partner to explore residential indoor air quality. The project was at a higher level of the rubric for most criteria compared to the educationally-focused case study. Use of the rubric at the start of any project will open important conversations, thereby contributing to both the community and academic partners more fully meeting their needs.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2204099
- PAR ID:
- 10617794
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Conferences
- Date Published:
- ISSN:
- 2153-5965
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 12
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Portland, Oregon
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
In the process of developing a smart city framework, sensor data are crucial to enable cities and communities to make informed decisions on future plans. Involving community-based organizations and residents is an integral component of this process to ensure equity and accessibility of data. This study aims to develop a sociotechnical network to (1) identify vulnerability zones; (2) measure data on flooding, air, and water quality; and (3) inform community members and decision-makers through a data dashboard. A small coastal town in the Texas Coastal Bend region is utilized as a case study. Methodologically, this study utilizes participatory action research to frame a mixed-methods approach toward developing a data dashboard. This research project is a practical guide for engaged scholars in the social sciences, engineering, and urban design fields. The outcomes include recommendations for the engaged community and provide a data-dashboard targeting academic and non-academic audiences, residents, and decision-makers.more » « less
-
The Strategic Partnership for Alignment of Community Engagement in STEM (SPACES) is a collaborative research effort under the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE program. The overarching goal of SPACES is to build an inclusive academic culture to address intersectional gender-race-ethnicity inequities in Environmental Engineering (EnvE) via the application of evidence-based strategies for systemic change. The two main thrusts of the project are to address systemic problems that cause: (1) underrepresented minority women faculty (URMWF) experiences of isolation in and/or departures from STEM academia and (2) the devaluation of research conducted by URMWF, especially community-engaged research (CER). SPACES is a collaborative effort of faculty and administrators from 11 universities with four leading professional societies. SPACES is adapting evidence-based practices to support women’s intersectional identities and catalyze an attitudinal change among individuals and institutional leaders. This process involves the pursuit of 12 objectives crossing the micro, meso, and macro levels and is being operationalized through 11 activities. An overview of the motivations for this project and activities to date are provided in the paper.more » « less
-
Background and Context. Research software in the Computing Education Research (CER) domain frequently encounters issues with scalability and sustained adoption, which limits its educational impact. Despite the development of numerous CER programming (CER-P) tools designed to enhance learning and instruction, many fail to see widespread use or remain relevant over time. Previous research has primarily examined the challenges educators face in adopting and reusing CER tools, with few focusing on understanding the barriers to scaling and adoption practices from the tool developers’ perspective. Objectives. To address this, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 tool developers within the computing education community, focusing on the challenges they encounter and the practices they employ in scaling their CER-P tools. Method. Our study employs thematic analysis of the semi-structured interviews conducted with developers of CER-P tools. Findings. Our analysis revealed several barriers to scaling highlighted by participants, including funding issues, maintenance burdens, and the challenge of ensuring tool interoperability for a broader user base. Despite these challenges, developers shared various practices and strategies that facilitated some degree of success in scaling their tools. These strategies include the development of teaching materials and units of curriculum, active marketing within the academic community, and the adoption of flexible design principles to facilitate easier adaptation and use by educators and students. Implications. Our findings lay the foundation for further discussion on potential community action initiatives, such as the repository of CS tools and the community of tool developers, to allow educators to discover and integrate tools more easily in their classrooms and support tool developers by exchanging design practices to build high-quality education tools. Furthermore, our study suggests the potential benefits of exploring alternative funding models.more » « less
-
Our NSF-funded ITEST project focuses on the collaborative design, implementation, and study of recurrent hands-on engineering activities with middle school youth in three rural communities in or near Appalachia. To achieve this aim, our team of faculty and graduate students partner with school educators and industry experts embedded in students’ local communities to collectively develop curriculum to aim at teacher-identified science standard and facilitate regular in-class interventions throughout the academic year. Leveraging local expertise is especially critical in this project because family pressures, cultural milieu, and preference for local, stable jobs play considerable roles in how Appalachian youth choose possible careers. Our partner communities have voluntarily opted to participate with us in a shared implementation-research program and as our project unfolds we are responsive to community-identified needs and preferences while maintaining the research program’s integrity. Our primary focus has been working to incorporate hands-on activities into science classrooms aimed at state science standards in recognition of the demands placed on teachers to align classroom time with state standards and associated standardized achievement tests. Our focus on serving diverse communities while being attentive to relevant research such as the preference for local, stable jobs attention to cultural relevance led us to reach out to advanced manufacturing facilities based in the target communities in order to enhance the connection students and teachers feel to local engineers. Each manufacturer has committed to designating several employees (engineers) to co-facilitate interventions six times each academic year. Launching our project has involved coordination across stakeholder groups to understand distinct values, goals, strengths and needs. In the first academic year, we are working with 9 different 6th grade science teachers across 7 schools in 3 counties. Co-facilitating in the classroom are representatives from our project team, graduate student volunteers from across the college of engineering, and volunteering engineers from our three industry partners. Developing this multi-stakeholder partnership has involved discussions and approvals across both school systems (e.g., superintendents, STEM coordinators, teachers) and our industry partners (e.g., managers, HR staff, volunteering engineers). The aim of this engagement-in-practice paper is to explore our lessons learned in navigating the day-to-day challenges of (1) developing and facilitating curriculum at the intersection of science standards, hands-on activities, cultural relevancy, and engineering thinking, (2) collaborating with volunteers from our industry partners and within our own college of engineering in order to deliver content in every science class of our 9 6th grade teachers one full school day/month, and (3) adapting to emergent needs that arise due to school and division differences (e.g., logistics of scheduling and curriculum pacing), community differences across our three counties (e.g., available resources in schools), and partner constraints.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--48509
