Making as a term has gained attention in the educational field. It signals many different meanings to many different groups, yet is not clearly defined. This project’s researchers refer to making as a term that bears social and cultural impact but with a broader more sociocultural association than definitions that center making in STEM learning. Using the theoretical lenses of critical relationality and embodiment, our research team position curriculum as a set of locally situated activities that are culturally, linguistically, socially, and politically influenced. We argue that curriculum
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Veronica OguilveWen WenEm BowenYousra AbourehabAmanda BermudezElizabeth GaxiolaJill Castek
Described by Wohlwend, Peppler, Keune and Thompson (2017) as “a range of activities that blend design and technology, including textile crafts, robotics, electronics, digital fabrication, mechanical repair or creation, tinkering with everyday appliances, digital storytelling, arts and crafts—in short, fabricating with new technologies to create almost anything” (p. 445), making can open new possibilities for applied, interdisciplinary learning in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Martin, 2015), in ways that decenter and democratize access to ideas, and promote the construction
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jill CastekMichelle Schira HagermanRebecca Woodland
This research paper critically explores the common definitions and perceptions of Making that may potentially disenfranchise traditionally underrepresented groups in engineering. Given the aspects of engineering design that are commonly integrated into Making activities, the Maker movement is increasingly recognized as a potentially transformative pathway for young people to developing early interest and understanding in engineering. However, “what counts” as Making can often be focused heavily on electronic-based and computational forms of Making, such as activities that involve 3D printers
This guide offers insight into community engagement practices and activity development from our making and equity project, Making Connections. It includes documentation and recommendations for work that is designed to engage community partners as equal partners, and is written most of all for other practitioners.
Jobs are growing most rapidly in areas that require STEM knowledge, causing business leaders to seek skilled American workers now and in the near future. Increase in the number of students pursuing engineering degrees is taking place but the percentages of underrepresented students in the engineering pipeline remains low. To address the challenge of increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in engineering, the National Society of Black Engineers, the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, and the Society of Women Engineers have formed the 50K Coalition, a collaborative of over 40 organizations committed to increasing the number of bachelors degrees awarded to women and minorities from 30,000 annually to 50,000 by 2025, a 66% increase. The 50K Coalition is using the Collective Impact framework to develop an evidence-based approach that drives management decision-making, improvements, sharing of information, and collective action to achieve success. The first convening of the 50K Coalition in April, 2016, brought together 83 leaders of the engineering community representing 13 professional societies with over 700,000 members, deans of engineering, minority engineering and women in engineering administrators from 11 leading colleges of engineering, and corporate partners representing six global industries. Consensus was reached on the following Common Agenda items: 1.) Undergraduate support and retention; 2.) Public awareness and marketing; 3.) K-12 support; 4.) Community College linkages; 5.) Culture and climate. The Coalition will encourage member organizations to develop new programs and scale existing programs to reach the goal.
The Coalition will use shared metrics to track progress: AP® Calculus completion and high school graduation rates; undergraduate freshmen retention rates; community college transfer rates and number of engineering degrees awarded. The 50K Coalition will develop the other elements of the Collective Impact framework: Infrastructure and effective decision-making processes that will become the backbone organization with a focus on data management, communications and dissemination; a system of continuous communication including Basecamp, website, the annual Engineering Scorecard, WebEx hosted meetings and convenings; and mutually reinforcing activities such as programs, courses, seminars, webinars, workshops, promotional campaigns, policy initiatives, and institutional capacity building efforts. The National Academy of Sciences study, Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America's Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads recommended that professional associations make recruitment and retention of underrepresented groups an organizational goal and implement programs designed to reach that goal by working with their membership, academic institutions and funding agencies on new initiatives. While these types of organizations work together now in a variety of ways, the relationships are one-on-one. The 50K Coalition brings together, for the first time professional societies, engineering schools, and industry to consider what mutually reinforcing activities can most effectively encourage students from underrepresented groups to complete calculus and graduate from 4-year engineering programs.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Karl ReidBarry CorderoSarah EcohawkKaren Horting
Utah Valley University (UVU) with partners Weber State University (WSU) and American Indian Services (AIS) are implementing UTAH PREP (PREParation for STEM Careers) to address the need for early preparation in mathematics to strengthen and invigorate the secondary-to-postsecondary-to-career STEM pipeline. As the preliminary groundwork for UTAH PREP, each partner currently hosts a PREP program (UVU PREP, WSU PREP, and AIS PREP) that identifies low-income, under-represented minority, first-generation, and female students entering seventh grade who have interest and aptitude in math and science, and involves them in a seven-week, three-year summer intensive program integrating STEM courses and activities. The course content blends skill-building academics with engaging experiences that promote a clear understanding of how mathematical concepts and procedures are applied in various fields of science and engineering. Courses are enhanced through special projects, field trips, college campus visits, and the annual Sci-Tech EXPO. The purpose of the program is to motivate and prepare participants from diverse backgrounds to complete a rigorous program of mathematics in high school so that they can successfully pursue STEM studies and careers, which are vital to advancing the regional and national welfare.
UTAH PREP is based on the TexPREP program that originated at the University of Texas at San Antonio and which was named as one of the Bright Spots in Hispanic Education by the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics in 2015. TexPREP was adapted by UVU for use in Utah for non-minority serving institutions and in regions with lower minority populations, but with great academic and college participation disparity. With NSF funding for a two-year pilot program, the project partners are building UTAH PREP through a networked improvement community, collective impact approach that, if demonstrably successful, has the ability to scale to a national level. This pilot program's objectives include: 1) creating a UTAH PREP collaboration with commitments to a common set of objectives and common set of plans to achieve them; 2) strengthening existing PREP programs and initiating UTAH PREP at two or three other institutions of higher education in Utah, each building a sustainable local support network; 3) developing a shared measurement system to assess the impact of UTAH PREP programs, adaptations, and mutually reinforcing activities on students, including those from groups that are underrepresented in STEM disciplines; and 4) initiating a backbone organization that will support future scaling of the program's impact.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Daniel HornsAndrew StoneVioleta Vasilevska
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. This project is exploring and identifying successful, cross-institutional approaches to using maker activities to engage members of communities of color (with a focus on family groups) in STEM activities.
The Challenger Reach 2 U program will reach over 6,500 fourth-grade students in 261 missions from underserved communities throughout southwest Colorado and northwestern New Mexico, including primarily rural, lower socio-economic status, Hispanic and Native American districts that seldom have such STEM educational opportunities. The Colorado Consortium for Earth and Space Science Education (CCESSE) will show that increasing the quality of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is not only a NASA goal set at the national level and a state and local priority, but is the underlying core competency of our organization as well. As an integral part of our Challenger Reach 2 U proposal to motivate interest in STEM curriculum and to strengthen the Nation's future workforce, we will thoroughly train teachers of these students to be more comfortable with technology and more prepared to deliver motivational STEM lessons, leaving an educational legacy that will greatly outlive the life of this grant. We will provide these students with cross-curricular preparatory lessons which will culminate with an exciting simulated space mission delivered in their own classrooms and moderated by a "NASA" mission director at our Center. With the help of the NASA grant, all of these services will be provided at no cost to the schools.
This presentation given at the 2013 Materials Research Society (MRS) Spring Meeting examines evidence for the effectiveness of STEM education programs at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.
San Francisco State University is collaborating with MESA of California to replicate the Mission Science Workshop (MSW) model for informal science education to establish 10 self-supporting interactive Community Science Workshops (CSW's) throughout California. The overriding theme for activities at the CSW's is to let children and parents "be" scientists as they explore through the use of interactive exhibits, hands-on building/tinkering activities and content workshops, while at the same time ensuring they learn correct science concepts. Content to be presented is from the areas of Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Mathematics. The target audience is primarily African-American, Latino, and Native American children in grades K-8 and their families.
Blackside, Inc. is producing a television series and an outreach component about minority scientists. The goals of the six-hour prime-time series, "Breakthrough: People of Color in Science," are to raise the consciousness of the general public that is largely unaware of the significant contribution of scientists of color and to provide role models that will encourage young people to consider science and engineering careers. The programs will feature the work of contemporary African-American, Latino and Native American scientists and engineers who are active in cell biology, astrophysics, applied mathematics and other fields of science. The stories of their scientific achievements will present both women and men, old and young, at different stages of their careers, and will explore the professional, educational and social worlds they live and work in. Viewers will have immediate access to a comprehensive follow-up effort that will connect them with local, regional and national opportunities in informal science education. Blackside will collect information from existing resources and institutions as well using source material from several extensively researched databases geared toward minority students. Using all of this information, Blackside will create a metadatabase that will connect teachers, parents, mentors, and students to a rich variety of educational programs: extracurricular classes, mentoring programs, national science contests, teacher training workshops, and a myriad of on-line services. To ensure immediate access and, where possible, to customize the information to viewers needs, Blackside will disseminate it through a variety of means: an 800-number with a direct fax-back capability, an on-line service, a CD-ROM, and a printed packet delivered by mail. A principal target audience is gatekeepers in students' lives: parents, teachers, and scientists interested in becoming mentors. The target audience also includes students from fourth th rough twelfth grades. Joseph Blatt will serve a PI for this project and co-executive producer for the television series. His previous experience include serving as executive producer of "Scientific American FRONTIERS" and as a producer/director for several NOVA programs. He also has been executive producer for three television series/college credit courses in mathematics. Henry Hampton will be the other co-executive producer. He was the creator and executive producer of the 14-hour, award winning series, "Eyes on the Prize," about America's civil rights movement. The principal educational consultant will be Ceasar McDowell, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Michael Ambrosino, the original executive producer of NOVA, will be the principal science television consultant.
This Communicating Research to Public Audiences (NSF 03-509) project is based on the PI's current NSF award: SBE-0545361- ADVANCE: Determining national science faculty demographics in order to empower women and guide solutions. This project will help address the need for underrepresented female faculty as role models and mentors in science and engineering. Although the number of female under-represented minority students (URM) in college has been increasing, there are astonishingly low numbers of female URM faculty in each science discipline. This project would produce a series of female URM faculty biographical videos to substitute for the lack of personal contact young women have with these role models. The videos would be widely disseminated through schools, colleges, and minority serving organizations to reach young women.