Welcome to Project ExCEED, a joint research project between the University of North Dakota's College of Education and College of Engineering and Mines.  In this video, we will share with you the background and goals of our project as we explore strategies for supporting elementary and middle school teachers in integrating culturally-relevant engineering tasks into their classrooms that are connected to their communities' authentic needs and interests. Our project includes teachers from primarily rural and Native-serving schools, and we aim to integrate professional development about engineering pedagogy with Indigenous STEM knowledge and ways of knowing to increase teachers' self-efficacy with implementing tasks that are relevant, meaningful, and accessible to all learners. 

We have just launched our project this spring and will begin our first professional development sessions for teachers this June. We are excited to begin this important work and to hear from you! We believe engineering is for everyone, and our hope is that our project will inspire teachers to integrate engineering tasks across their curriculum and for students to see applications of engineering in relevant aspects of their lives. Please reach out with questions, comments, or feedback! 

I'm super intrigued by this project and its potential to create youths' and teachers' meaningful engagement in engineering in ways that draws on community's strengths and design challenges important to Native American and rural communities. Water is a lovely way to bound the project. Will your research primarily involve questions about teachers' learning or will you also consider the ways youth learn and engage with the engineering design tasks? What kinds of research questions frame the project work? I'll be interested to see how this project progresses. Thank you for sharing! Good luck with the work!

Thank you so much for your comment, Heidi! At this point, our research questions focus on teachers' self-efficacy and changes to their integration of culturally relevant engineering instruction, but we absolutely are interested in how this approach impacts students' engagement. We hope that exploring student perceptions will be a part of future iterations of our project!  

Hello everyone, thank you again for taking the time to support and engage with Project ExCEED we have a couple of questions that we would welcome a discussion on as we prepare for our first professional development with teachers. 

For fellow researchers, what cultural relevancy framework has worked best for you when working with middle school teachers? 

For our teachers and researchers what have you discovered as best practices for situating community issues and problem based learning within the classroom? 

Hi, a very interesting project.  I like its local grounding.  What issues do your teachers encounter with finding time/room for project work in the school schedules?  What negotiations with school leadership have been necessary to allow teacheres to incorporate their learning into their practice?

Thank you so much, Brian! We really appreciate your feedback, and what great questions. We started by asking a group of principals what their vision was for engineering and STEM in their schools. They provided us with such thoughtful and reflective considerations that discussed both their goals and needs for successful implementation within their communities. Then, we really designed much of our project from there, so we had the support and collaboration with the administration from the start. We wanted to integrate throughout our project's development, even in writing the proposal, a community asset-based approach. An important goal of our project is for teachers to embed engineering into their existing curriculum, so our aim is that they are not having to add one more thing into their already busy schedules but using the engineering tasks to enhance their existing curriculum and integration of content standards. Thank you so much again for your thoughtful questions! 

Great question, Dan. One of our goals with this project is that it be adaptable - to different communities, cultural groups, grade levels, subject matters, etc. In planning the teacher professional development we've been having a lot of discussion about connecting cultural relevancy with the engineering design process by focusing on the "defining" stage of the process. That is where students and teachers can identify needs in their own community and use their own experiences to define the problem they are trying to solve and the constraints and criteria that are most important. One challenge in scaling to other communities may be in identifying the community resources, both cultural and technical, that teachers can access to help guide this defining stage.

Implementing a project to explore strategies for supporting elementary and middle school teachers in integrating  culturally relevant engineering tasks into their classroom is important, especially as they relate to Native Americans. The project will use teachers from rural and Native serving schools. I am curious as to who will conduct the professional development  (PD) for these teachers? Are any Native American professionals involved? Are Native Americans at any level  involved in project implementation? How did you determine what is culturally relevant for this population? The Native Americans, as are African Americans, and Latinos, are drastically underserved in scientific fields. 

Julia, thank you so much for raising this important question. One resource we are using is a document called the North Dakota Native American Essential Understandings, which was created several years ago as a collaboration between Tribal Elders from North Dakota's five Nations and the Department of Public Instruction. This framework outlines elements of culturally relevant instruction and pedagogy that are considered essential for being inclusive of Indigenous students in North Dakota. 

https://www.nd.gov/dpi/education-programs/india...

Our PD will include Native American professionals and community members who can introduce our participants to the Essential Understandings and ways of integrating this framework and cultural knowledge into their instruction. We do, however, welcome suggestions for additional resources that provide frameworks for incorporating culturally relevant instruction, as Beth mentioned! Thank you so much for your feedback. 

What a wonderful project. I love how you begin with children's literature and progress into geographically and culturally relevant STEM content! 

Wonderful project.

We are water protectors is such a beautiful and inspiring work of art. Our 5 year old requests it often to read. It helps spark conversation around the importance of water and how we can all be water protecters, just like how the books asks us all to be at the end.

Where can we follow along as this project continues to grow? Do you have trained mentors that came from your project working now?

Putting "We are Water Protectors" on my shopping list! Thanks for sharing. Best wishes for your project.