NSF Awards: 2010169
The inclusion of engineering into states’ science standards requires teachers across grade levels to integrate engineering education effectively into their science curricula. Of further importance is ensuring that engineering tasks are relevant and meaningful to students to foster engagement and increase diverse representation in STEM trajectories. Native Americans remain the least represented group in engineering domains, and this phenomenon is attributed to a Western presentation of engineering that does not incorporate the cultural knowledge, values, and beliefs embedded in a community. Using a culturally relevant approach that situates engineering tasks within authentic, community-situated contexts has the potential to increase Native American students’ engagement with and valuing of engineering and will also enrich the learning of all students. Yet this approach requires sufficient training and support for teachers who may already lack self-efficacy in engineering education. Project ExCEED addresses this need for improved teacher training in effectively teaching engineering through an on-going, collaborative professional development program for upper elementary and middle school teachers in North Dakota, focusing on rural and Native schools surrounding and within the Spirit Lake and Turtle Mountain Nations. Over the course of a two-year cycle, teachers progress from learners to mentors as they become proficient in designing and implementing engineering design tasks in their classrooms aligned to their existing curriculum and authentic community interests. Midway into our project’s first year, our preliminary findings indicate an increase in teachers’ self-efficacy not only with teaching engineering but with connecting to the community and cultures of their students. Further, we can see an impact on teachers’ inclusion of culturally relevant pedagogy across their classroom curricula.
Frank Bowman
Associate Professor & Chair
Welcome to Project ExCEED, a joint research project between the University of North Dakota's Colleges of Education and Engineering & Mines, in collaboration with the ND Northeast Education Services Cooperative. In this video, we share some of our work to build teacher capacity and self-efficacy in developing and implementing engineering design tasks in the classroom that align with their existing curricula and authentic community interests.
At the center of our work is a culturally relevant engineering design framework that guides both our teacher professional development and teachers' lesson planning. By incorporating principles from the North Dakota Native American Essential Understandings, culturally relevant pedagogy, and the engineering design process the framework helps teachers connect engineering design to the community and cultures of their students. As we finish up the first year of our project we have already seen increased teacher confidence and high levels of student engagement. We are excited to continue this important work and to hear from you. Please reach out with questions, comments, or feedback!
Christina Baze
K. Renae Pullen
Science Specialist
Such an exciting project. I really appreciate the engineering design framework. Thanks for making it available.
Can you share more about how you've seen this project impact students and teachers outside of the STEM classroom? I know it's anecdotal, but it's always exciting to learning about indirect impacts and shifts in instruction and relationships.
Julie Robinson
Assistant Professor
Thank you so much for the feedback and for your great question, Renae! One way our project has impacted teachers is within their practice in other content areas besides STEM. They have expressed that they are embedding more problem-solving, focus on iteration, choice, and culturally relevant instructional practices across their curriculum, not just for their engineering design tasks! Some teachers have also described the impact of learning for themselves about their local community and histories through this work. Today, I had the amazing experience of chatting with one of our teachers who said that she is finding herself more comfortable letting students guide learning experiences and that she is feeling confident about not being "in charge"! They also feel very motivated to engage their colleagues in this work and have fostered more collaborative teaching experiences within their own school settings. What a great question - it really got me thinking about some of these more indirect impacts!
Christina Baze
K. Renae Pullen
Stacy Klein-Gardner
Brian Foley
Professor
Really interesting. The framework goes by in the video pretty fast (good thing we can pause), but I like the way you define culturally relevant engineering around community-based needs and then describe the need (systems thinking!) and generate solutions. That seems like a powerful but workable structure for classroom engineering projects that are personally and culturally relevant.
What would you say is the most challenging aspect for teachers to adopt this approach?
Frank Bowman
Associate Professor & Chair
From the start we've felt strongly that engineering design is inherently tied to community needs and culture. I think one of the difficulties for teachers initially was understanding the engineering design process itself (that it's more than just an engaging hands-on activity) and seeing how to integrate it and relevant cultural/community aspects into their existing curriculum. As they implemented their first classroom design task and saw how students responded they gained a lot of confidence and began seeing other opportunities to incorporate principles of engineering design and cultural relevancy into their classrooms.
Brian Foley
Rita Hagevik
Teachers mentoring each other is a great idea! What types of community-based projects have the teachers developed so far for example? Connecting to the community is so important! Check out our COMPASS2 video at https://stemforall2022.videohall.com/presentations/2631
Julie Robinson
Assistant Professor
Thank you so much, Rita! We look forward to checking out your video as well! We are really enthusiastic about our teachers becoming mentors for a new cohort and deepening their learning even more through that process. Our teachers have developed some amazing design tasks so far: for example, students learned about designing dams but through the historical context of the flooding of local Native land, they have designed water filtration systems to clean the water of the local Devils Lake, and they have discussed the importance of having recreation for local teens, listened to Elder interviews about this topic, and then designed models of possible recreation facilities for their community. They already have ideas for next year as well!
Ann Cavallo
Assistant Vice Provost and Director
Thank you for sharing this great project and video. You mentioned that you have already seen increased teacher confidence and high levels of student engagement. Were these observations measured in some way or are they more informal observations? How did you, or will you more formally measure/evaluate such changes and other impacts of your program? Thanks much!
Frank Bowman
Associate Professor & Chair
We're using the TESS survey to measure teacher self-efficacy and saw growth for before and after last summer's professional development. Teachers will be taking the TESS again soon. Based on what we've seen and what teachers' have expressed in debrief interviews after implementing their engineering design tasks we expect to see even more growth. Teachers have also reported high levels of student engagement, but that isn't something that we are directly measuring as part of this project.
We are also using a couple other surveys to measure teacher use of and confidence with culturally responsive teaching methods. And analyzing classroom videos, teacher interviews, and lesson plans to understand changes in teacher practice and pedagogy. As this school year ends we will have a full year of data and pre/post survey results that will allow us to better measure what changes have occurred.
Ann Cavallo
Ann Cavallo
Assistant Vice Provost and Director
Thank you - sounds like you will have a significant amount of data from a variety of sources to inform your work. Very relevant and important project!
Stacy Klein-Gardner
How might you suggest take your findings and techniques and use them at the high school level?
Bethany Klemetsrud
Assistant Professor
Hi Stacy,
Thanks for your question. Our project right now focuses on developing efficacy with elementary and middle school teachers. The Culturally Relevant Engineering Design Framework could easily be used in the high school level and would center around NGSS - HS.Engineering Standards. There would be a lot of opportunities for the high school students to meaningful engage within their community using Engineering Design all while meeting the NGSS standards and the Native American Essential Understandings.
Christina Baze
Francheska Figueroa
Great project! I was wondering if the mentor teachers are inservice teachers working with preservice teachers or are they mentoring based on need or interest. Such a great way to get teachers working with teachers in such a powerful way!
Julie Robinson
Assistant Professor
Thank you for the question, Francheska! We are working just with in-service teachers at this point. Our first year cohort will act as mentors for our second year cohort based on their prior experience in the project. I love the idea of bringing this work into pre-service teacher education at some point, though! We have also been excited by the collaboration among our teachers and think that they are such important supports and role models for each other!
Jennifer Kidd
Great Project! We are doing similar work, but pairing preservice teachers with engineering students to teach culturally responsive engineering lessons to elementary school students. We are also measuring PSTs' self-efficacy, and have had positive results. However, we are finding that the bridge between pre-service and inservice can be challenging to traverse and we are not sure our PSTs are going on to teach engineering in their classrooms once they graduate, although we are working on ways to support this. How are you incentivizing teachers to teach the engineering lessons? What role do engineers play in your project? I love the community focus of your project- obviously so critical to your success. Congratulations on a great project!
Christina Baze
Julie Robinson
Assistant Professor
This sounds amazing, Jennifer! Thank you for sharing about your project. I love the idea of involving pre-service teachers and the direct connection with engineering students. Is there any way you will be able to stay in contact with your PST once they are in classrooms to see the longitudinal impact of your project? We have two engineering professors, Frank and Beth, on our research team who are essential for supporting the development of teachers' understanding and implementation of the design process in their tasks. We are providing stipends, materials, resources, and a great deal of on-going support for our teachers as incentives, but we have also found that their investment in the work is inspiring participation from their colleagues as well, as we bring a new cohort into our project this year!
Christina Baze
Great video, all! Julie, you know I'm a fan of this work. One thing I have noticed is that explicit considerations of ethics are so often missing from engineering education design principles (I have an as-yet-unpublished paper about this). How are you leveraging cultural relevance and community resources/needs to support students (and teachers?) thinking about the ethics of engineering work?
And on a side note, there are several excellent videos in this year's showcase highlighting work in empathy and engineering. While empathy isn't necessarily a focus of this work, there may be some interesting overlaps between projects. So, I wanted to make sure you all were aware of the following: