RET Site: Engineering for People and the Planet: Research Experiences for Teaching Integrated STEM

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The Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Site at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) focuses on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for an integrated approach of learning and doing science, math, and engineering through real-world problems that focus on people and the planet. A WPI pre-service teacher and a local in-service teacher will be paired to do summer research for six-weeks in a lab with a faculty mentor on topics, such as food safety, healthy lives, clean energy, and quality education. Five teacher pairs will participate each summer in professional development workshops to translate their research experience into lesson plans and classroom activities, as well as present their work to broader audiences. This project will impact a large number of high school science, tech/engineering, and math (STEM) teachers and high school students in underserved districts with populations that are racially and ethnically diverse. By building the capacity for strong STEM educators in the region, this program can provide relevant STEM learning opportunities that engage students to develop real-world problem solving skills and help prepare the next generation of scientists and engineers.The objectives of this project are to: 1) Provide authentic research experiences centered around Engineering for People and the Planet, as inspired by the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals to pre-service and in-service teachers around the City of Worcester, Massachusetts; 2) Deliver high-quality professional development on the teaching of “Integrated STEM”; 3) Assist RET participants in both creating lessons and activities based on their research and disseminating their work to students in their classroom and broader audiences including TeachEngineering.org; 4) Increase RET participants’ confidence and knowledge about Engineering for People and the Planet, the Engineering Design Process, and teaching Integrated STEM; and 5) Form an on-going Community of Practice for peer and near-peer mentoring among WPI pre-service teachers, Worcester area in-service teachers, WPI faculty and graduate students, industry advisors, and the STEM Education Center. Five pre-service teachers from WPI’s Teacher Preparation Program (current WPI STEM undergraduates) and five local in-service high school teachers from high need schools will be paired for annual cohorts to conduct summer engineering research with WPI faculty for six weeks. Research topics include: 1) sensors for food safety, 2) novel antimicrobials for treating infections, 3) brain sensing for personalized learning environments, 4) catalytic conversion of food wastes into renewable fuel, 5) spectroscopy for detecting hazardous chemicals, and 6) sustainable production methods through engineering biosynthetic processes. The UN Sustainable Development Goals unify these research projects as “Engineering for People and the Planet,” and provide a context and platform for teaching “Integrated STEM,” leading to effective and engaged K-12 learning. Teachers will have weekly workshops to guide their research project as they learn research techniques to culminate in a poster for a public RET Symposium, and to translate their research experience into lesson plans implemented in their classrooms.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.