Strengthening and Supporting the Community College Leadership Role in Advancing STEM Technician Education

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The Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program focuses on educating a skilled technical workforce to keep the United States advanced technological industries globally competitive, and has supported this goal for the past 25 years. A critical partner in this effort has been and continues to be the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), which provides a direct link between the program and US community and technical colleges. The AACC has supported community college leaders to make the connections needed to build and sustain STEM programs. The AACC has also mentored faculty and catalyzed new collaborations that have strengthened technician education programs across the nation. This project will continue this work by supporting the networking and professional enrichment provided by the ATE Principal Investigator (PI) Conferences and the MentorLinks program. It will also create a new program for senior leaders of community and technical colleges, to enhance understanding of advanced technological education and nationally expand its implementation.In this project, the AACC aims to: broaden the impact of community college leadership in advancing STEM technician education; encourage greater numbers of community colleges to develop and/or to strengthen existing ATE-related programs; create and support venues for STEM professional and leadership development; support STEM capacity building through direct engagement with community college presidents and senior administrators; and disseminate the value, resources, and accomplishments of the ATE program. Project activities include organizing four ATE PI Conferences and expanding the AACC's successful MentorLinks program to enable 20 community colleges to develop new or strengthen existing STEM technician education programs. It will also develop and implement an ATE Administrative Leadership Engagement program, designed to provide peer-to-peer professional development for community college presidents and senior administrators, to raise awareness of and support for the implementation of ATE awards and STEM capacity building. This Administrative Leadership Program will offer: (1) ATE Presidents' Breakfast Discussion Roundtables at the AACC's annual convention; (2) A workshop for community college presidents with resulting proceedings report, held in conjunction with the 2020 ATE Conference focused on identifying and sharing promising strategies to support the successful implementation of ATE awards on their campuses; (3) A webinar series targeting topics relevant to administrators, as identified through the workshop and roundtables; The project will also disseminate ATE program resources, information, and opportunities through the project website, feature articles, presentations, conference proceedings, and the use of social media; evaluate project activities including two ATE focus groups designed to strengthen the annual ATE Conference; and publish research findings on AACC's MentorLinks program resulting from a 2018-2019 longitudinal study covering the program's impact over a period of 14 years.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.