HBCU-DCL: Collaborative Workshop Between the Experimental Centric Pedagogy and Mobile Hands-On STEM Projects

Morgan State University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

The Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Experimental Centric Pedagogy (ECP) project, with the collaboration of the Mobile Hands-On STEM (MOHS) project supports a joint workshop that will explore broader impacts and intellectual merit of ECP within the context of the successful features of a Minority Serving collaboration. This workshop pursues expansion of an pedagogy that is adaptive to a wide variety of fields and that engages and stimulates interest by a large population of under-served minority students enrolled in the 13 engineering programs. The guiding hypothesis is that engineering education works best in a learning environment in which experimentation plays a central role. The MOHS project pursues complementary activities including mobile hands-on student learning environments. The workshop that is hosted by the HBCU ECP and MOHS groups will work with engineering practitioners and expand the scope of the learning pedagogy. Also, they seek to reach out to Hispanics Serving Institutions to understand the opportunities to expand beyond HBCUs. This includes exercises classifying educational activities using Blooms Taxonomy and SWOT analysis. The workshops seeks to outline several previously identified areas of need for using ECP including; systems engineering and integration, design of plans teaching troubleshooting and debugging; and can it be used beyond the original HBCUs and become inclusive like working with Hispanic Serving Institutions; does the pedagogy support authentic engineering experiences. Participants will be invited from a wide range of diverse backgrounds to establish how best to bring ECP to other communities. This project will add to our understanding on how an experimental centric pedagogy impacts underrepresented minorities in engineering education and may influence our future workforce of engineers in the U.S. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.