RET Site: Exploring Career Opportunities through Water-Themed Engineering Research (ECO-WaTER)

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This Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Site at the University of Kansas (KU) will immerse high school science and math teachers in water-themed engineering research. The aim of this program is to deliver activities that create an engaging context for teachers to learn engineering design through projects that span environmental, mechanical, and chemical engineering fields. The research addresses grand challenges, such as removing salt from seawater or the cleanup of wastewater generated from oil and gas production, topics with both local and global significance and broad appeal to participants and their high-school age students. This will help guide the creation of new curricula that integrates engineering into science and math courses in alignment with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), filling a nationally important gap in secondary education. In addition, a key goal will be to address calls from policy and business leaders seeking to better prepare students for 21st century careers. This goal will be achieved by making career opportunities more visible to participants and their students, leveraging the industrial experience of the faculty and nine company partners. The plan for disseminating new educational resources involves having each participant create two toolkits for their lessons to share with other teachers, thus attracting more educators to learn about this RET project and adopt its curricula. Teachers will be recruited from rural and urban school districts in Kansas that serve high proportions of minorities and economically disadvantaged students. With KU's rich history of mentoring high school teachers and partnering with chemical companies, the project team is positioned to achieve program objectives, which are to: (1) engage high school teachers in discovery and technology-based engineering research; (2) integrate engineering into science and math curricula; (3) prepare and inspire high school students for careers in science and engineering; (4) nurture long-term linkages between KU, business leaders and the educational community; (5) provide professional development to educators and graduate students; and (6) prepare high school teachers to serve as education leaders and mentors for future teachers. Research projects will address issues related to clean water, including new methods for detecting water quality and new advanced materials for separating salt from seawater and for treating oily wastewater. Other projects will explore ways to reduce the strain on water resources caused by energy production, including designing more efficient alternatives to existing processes like cooling units at power plants. An evaluator will assess training activities and the education benefits. A pre-summer workshop will prepare faculty and graduate students to serve as effective mentors for the participants. Participants will gain experience with basic engineering concepts, research experiences and safe lab practices. Professional growth sessions will address crosscutting concepts, assessment methods, problem-based learning, and argumentation. Other sessions will feature industry careers/pathways and tours of campus and industrial facilities. Resources will be shared with other teachers and teachers-in-training at workshops, conferences and through YouTube videos. Faculty and graduate student mentors will visit participants classrooms to aid lesson implementation. High school students will learn about careers as part of the curricula and through virtual career fairs.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.