Pre-Engineering Education Collaborative at Four: Approaching the Final Phases

This paper will contain a short introduction and description of the Pre-Engineering Education Collaborative program sponsored by NSF and enacted at North Dakota State University, NDSU. PEEC is a program to expand the inclusion of Native American students into the engineering career field while at the same time opening awareness of the opportunities available in tribal communities for engineering talent. It is proposed that such an inclusion will expand the opportunities for engineering career fields on the reservation. A description will be provided as to how the initial concepts have evolved during the years of operation. Also contained within the paper will be a description of the serendipitous events relating to resources, administration staff and students success stories and the implications they have for future successes. Following that will be a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the less than optimal activities and the resulting opportunities in the context of the evolving nature of educational responses. Finally, some approaches will be suggested to obtain positive results from these situations. Future needs and prospects will be discussed to include follow-on funding and extensions to other tribal colleges and mainstream institutions. The Program & Justification for Focus: The Pre-Engineering Education Collaborative, PEEC, is a rather unique program funded by the National Science Foundation, NSF, in the summer of 2010. It is a way to get tribal colleges and universities, TCUs, to work with mainstream institutions to develop an engineering pipeline through TCUs to graduate Native American students from four-year mainstream institutions into the engineering profession. If one believes that engineering resources should be applied in proportion to the local need then tribal communities, on some particular reservations, are great places for engineering application. As enacted, the program had funding from two NSF directorates, Engineering and Human Development and as a result had two primary goals. One of the goals was the development of engineering capable curriculum and students at TCUs. The second goal was to look at educational approaches to bring minority students into the engineering profession. The focus of this paper will be on what could be expressed as the following proposal: “What does it take to get more Native American students through an engineering program?” These NSF backed goals have some common characteristics while at the same time being operationally distinct because of public law. The obvious commonality is that both goals aim at producing more engineering graduates from an underrepresented population. The operational distinction comes from the requirement that no funding from the particular agency sponsoring this program within the Human Development Directorate at NSF is permitted, by law, to go to P ge 26241.2 any mainstream institutions. This was to some extent prompted by the title “collaborative” put on the program which implied direct funding to participating institutions providing for more equity in decision-making, particularly for TCUs. During the development of the program this was not seen as a huge constraint but it was only recognized as such later on. It will be addressed later in this paper. For more information on the funding, see NSF solicitation 10-501. This collaborative approach actually has several possible positive benefits to it, some of which include the following: It provides for early and continued association between faculty and staff from the two types of institutions. This association is able to address questions of curriculum development and administrative procedures tailored to the students who eventually make the transfer. It also provides both groups of academics with some background regarding the operation of the other type of institution to a level not known before because of the course transfer issues. Over time this allows for a particularly strong sense of trust to be developed among collaboratives, as expanded upon below. Curriculum formulation in support of engineering education, to an ABET approved level, necessitates faculty professional development for science, mathematics and technology instructors as well as the “rare” engineering instructor on staff at the TCU. These levels of interaction eventually strengthens individual collaborations between academics in the program, which heightens concern for the students on either side of the transition process. Additional benefits also accrue to the TCUs by avoiding the most costly segment of engineering education: laboratories woven throughout final two years of most programs. The students would also benefit from taking basic engineering courses, i.e. math and science courses at the local institution closer to their “homes” with a relative small class size. A benefit to the mainstream institution would be that they gain diversity in their graduating classes without proportional expansion of general student recruiting activities. It is also seen that there might be some nontrivial benefit to participating faculty at mainstream institutions with respect to experiencing effective teaching approaches for diverse students. Both groups of academics recognize the opportunity for development of infrastructure in the local tribal communities in response to some serious needs of their populations. Initial Concepts & Operation: Initial proposals seeking funding were diverse and dynamic enough to cause NSF to double the actual awards from 2 to 4. This expanded number also caused the focus to not only include Native American students but Pacific island students as well. In all proposals, groups of indigenous students would receive fundamental engineering courses to include basic sciences and mathematics to Associates of Science degree levels. All proposals included some student recruitment activities, recognizing the need to establish the intake of the student pipeline to be somewhere in the high school years. All proposals also recognized the need for community outreach to exemplify the opportunity available for local engineering talent to work on infrastructure development needs within their respective communities. Beyond these areas of P ge 26241.3 commonality, each of the four awarded collaboratives were individualistic and had particular approaches to meet the fundamental needs of the grant. The PEEC: NDSU proposal was rather unique within this small group of collaboratives in that it was the only proposal that brought together four autonomous TCUs: Cankdeska Cikana, Turtle Mountain Community College, Fort Berthold Community College and Sitting Bull College, with a singular mainstream institution, NDSU. Two of the four funded collaboratives brought together two mainstream institutions and a single TCU while the fourth collaborative brought satellite campuses within the same state University system together with the main campus in that system. As envisioned in the original proposal, PEEC: NDSU was to have the collaborative of TCUs working with the mainstream institution under the guidance of three advisory boards: Administrative, Instructional and Professional. It was envisioned that these three advisory boards would act as guides for the proposal. As envisioned, the role of the Administrative Advisory Board, composed of the PI’s from all of the collaborating institutions, would be to cooperate and coordinate on items to ensure a smooth flow of the educational process for the students to include the acceptance of classes for exchange credit with minimum hassle and maximum efficacy. The Instructional Advisory Board was responsible for developing curriculum and utilizing shared resources for the betterment of the entire cadre of students independent of institutional boundaries. The Instructional Advisory Board would be responsible for ensuring that all classes met the criteria of the ABET accreditation commission. This board was led by the full professor from NDSU, an individual familiar with multiple ABET evaluation visits. This board would also act as the direct interface with the students in the program. The Professional Advisory Board actually had two rules to play within the proposal. This board was comprised of both the engineering instructors within the program and Native American engineering professionals in the area and region. The first responsibility of this board of engineers was to ensure the relevance of the instruction with respect to current engineering practice. With the help of the instructor members, this board could translate that professional need into curriculum course requirements for the students. In addition the Professional Advisory Board served as a unique role model for the engineers in-training since the board members had personally experienced nearly all of the same out-of-the-classroom challenging situations as these would be practitioners could foresee. In addition the Professional Advisory Board provided a perspective on employment opportunities; several members had their own businesses. This was clearly a designed step toward the post-graduation entry into the profession, an aspect of the original proposal. Of the three advisory boards, the Instructional Advisory Board was the most active but more will be said below. The mechanics of the proposal stated that the students would start at the TCUs by taking an introductory engineering course to be offered through an interactive video network, IVN, to each of the sites from NDSU. Each TCU was responsible for putting together a program of P ge 26241.4 humanities and social sciences and mathematics through calculus II with a minimum chemistry and physics for the core sciences. The proposal stated that fundamental engineering courses such as statics, dynamics, surveying & thermodynamics, would be offered in a shared/distance education mode for several reasons. The first would be that the total student numbers would not be