Collaborative HSI Conference: Co-designing an engineering education research agenda

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The National Science Foundation Dear Colleague letter NSF 17-092: Improving Undergraduate STEM Education in Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) calls for conference proposals that will help identify challenges and opportunities in STEM education at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). Given the lack of resources that many engineering educators face attending conferences, this proposal consists of a series of traveling workshops that target engineering educators from HSIs. The focus on these workshops is to leverage design thinking methodologies to better understand the HSI institutional context and co-develop research need with educators through an iterative and emergent analysis process.The two-day workshops will take place at the University of Texas at El Paso (PI institution) and the University of Miami (Coral Gables, FL). Texas and Florida have some of the highest concentration of HSIs in the country, and both locations are within a short driving distance to several 2-year and 4-year institutions considered HSIs. Pre-workshop activities will help participants establish a baseline understanding of the needs, values, cultures, and characteristics of participants and their home institutions. During the workshop, participants will be introduced to three educational approaches that will help them examine their own beliefs and contexts and developinitial questions of interest about their institution, their students, and themselves as it relates to positively impacting the educational experiences of their students. The three approaches are Design Thinking, Intrinsic Motivation, and students as Empowered Agents. Using these ideas, participants will also develop a prototype of something they can try upon returning to their institution, and, through this prototyping process, they will continue to record emerging research questions and needs. A follow-up workshop at the ASEE Conference in June of 2018 will allow participants to share their reactions to their prototype experience. This workshop will also serve to disseminate and refine the resulting research agenda. The expected outcomes of this proposal are to produce (1) a set of research questions and needs to support the National Science Foundation?s development of an HSI-focused research agenda, (2) educational experiments and prototypes for dissemination within the conference community and (3) a conference-design framework for identifying non-obvious research needs and engaging educators in the engineering educationresearch and scholarship process.