Welcome to our video describing a collaborative partnership between faculty at William & Mary, middle school teachers in Newport News Public Schools, and undergraduates from university chapters of the National Society of Black Engineers. We would love to hear your ideas, questions, and feedback on our project through the following questions:

1) What potential do you see for the use of the engineering design notebooks in classroom partnerships?

2) How have you seen engineering effectively integrated into mathematics and science classes with a standardized curriculum and testing?

3) What factors do you find to be particularly powerful in partnership work?

4) What are other partnership models in schools that show promise for promoting culturally relevant STEM education?

Hi Meredith. I love seeing this project come to life. What a powerful way to connect stakeholders in culturally relevant engineering education, and I've never seen virtual notebooks as a mentoring model-- super creative. I'm wondering: How do you, the middle school teachers, and the college students come to a shared understanding of the college student mentors' roles? What kinds of support do they get to enact those roles? In other words, do they engage in professional learning re: their roles? I ask because we've found that the college students' roles in our project were CRITICAL in promoting middle school students' affiliation with the project activities.

Hi Meredith and team!

Kristie Gutierrez told us about your project. Can you share a little more? How often did the teams meet with each other and with the middle schoolers? Were they working with middle schoolers individually or as a class. In school, out of school? Sounds like a great collaboration!

Hi Heidi! Thanks so much for your kind words. Your question is an important one and actually was a driving question of this exploratory study [EAGER grant]. We wanted to figure out how collaboration dynamics played out between the partnerships, and what practices teachers and undergraduates naturally drew upon when working together to establish clear roles in the planning and implementation of engineering. We provided teachers with time to plan, common district-wide language and norms around engineering practices, and tools to organize their design task and implementation schedule. However, we did not provide training on defining roles because we wanted to compare the 6 partnerships first to see what practices could be leveraged in future professional development. We are currently working on revisions to a manuscript for Urban Education about this that details three different cases of collaborations and how the teacher and undergraduates leveraged expertise and power dynamics to define their roles in the classroom and push the bounds of culturally relevant education in science and mathematics classrooms. I can send you this draft soon. From our data analysis though, we found that our mentors need clear guidance on how to engage with students around the different engineering practices. We have an ITEST grant, in review, that defines key literacy strategies that will be used to support engineers to define their roles. This includes having the undergraduates practice think-alouds around their own design thinking in an effort to model their thinking about engineering problems to students, providing critical and interactive feedback, and communicating solutions to broader audiences. We will be piloting some of these strategies this summer in an out-of-school camp to see how the professional development for mentors on engineering literacies supports a clearer role in their partnerships with teachers.

I love the idea of student-to-student mentoring/collaboration. Was this a one-to-one type setup or did one undergraduate work with several students?

The multimedia notebook also sounds intriguing and a great idea for supporting the interaction between mentor and mentee. In what other ways did the participants connect with each other?

Also wondering what some of the final design projects looked like. Is there a place one could see some of them?

This is a project that has merit and can be considered transformative. It uses engineering design to create authentic learning experiences for young children in the classroom  through partnering undergraduate students of color with classroom teachers. The presence of these undergraduate engineering students in the classroom encourages the young children to see themselves as engineers, as well as helping them recognize the role of engineers in society. The partnership with the undergraduate students is a great way to reach new populations of students who may be interested in studying engineering in college. The decoding aspect of the  engineering design creates authentic learning experiences  for the young children. I like this project very much.

Dr. Clark, thank you. You may not remember this but we met at an ITEST summit several years ago to discuss some of these ideas (I used to work at Howard prior to William & Mary). I particularly remember your enthusiasm about the role of the undergraduates from university NSBE chapters in STEM classrooms. We currently have an ITEST in review to understand how literacy strategies (e.g. think-aloud, sentence frames, and modeling explanations) can support the professional learning of mentors to play a larger role in the classroom alongside math and science teachers. Your advice has supported the transformation of some of this work, and I am grateful. 

Hi Merideth,

Thanks for a great video.  We love seeing EarSketch and the Amazon competition featured.  It is exciting.

I want to address your first and second questions, about integrating engineering into math and science and using engineering notebooks.  The AMP-IT-UP project, which was funded by a large NSF Math/Science partnership grant, created semester-long middle school engineering courses (named STEM-ID courses), and parallel 1-week math and science modules.  You can see a variety of videos about it in the video multiplex from past years.  We have published research data about the effect that the engineering course had on students' math and science standardized test scores.  Students were put into the courses randomly, and those who had STEM-ID courses at least twice in middle school showed very significant increases in their 8th grade math and science test scores. (Alemdar, M., J. Gale, J. Lingle, R. Moore, J. Rosen, M. Usselman. (2018) The Impact of a Middle School Engineering Course on Students’ Academic Achievement and Non-cognitive Skills, International Journal of Education in Mathematics, Science, and Technology).  

We want to scale up the STEM-ID courses and are definitely looking for partners.  One component of the STEM-ID courses is an electronic Engineering Design Process Log.  A video describes it at https://mediaspace.gatech.edu/id/1_lfuu1y25?wid... We would love to talk about how it has been used.

Hi Meredith! 

So great to see Your Voice is Power in action!! Love the way you formatted the notebook content. I lead the Amazon-EarSketch partnership at Georgia Tech and would love to connect with you. I would value your insights on the curriculum and would be happy to discuss future collaboration. I was also an architect of the Engineering Design Process Log described by Marion, above, and am very keen on making engineering design and its documentation accessible to students. I believe we can provide better feedback to students (more timely, lower stakes, less embarrassing if the student doesn't feel successful) by using technology to enhance these tools. 

Great project and video!

Ms. Wright and Ms. Boachie, I noticed the "OUTKAST framework" under the Layers of Injustice section. Can you say more about this framework/model and how students responded to or used it? 

I think this is a great project to use music and social justice as entryway into engineering and computing. I wonder, did you also see the effect in the opposite direction? Did you have students that were already into engineering and computing but then learned to leverage those skills to express themselves musically? 

Hello Brian, 

The OUTKAST Imagination Framework was developed by Dr. Jocelyn Wilson, professor of Hip Hop Studies and Digital Humanities in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Dr. Wilson is a scholar in Black Media Studies and she created a framework to help her students decode song lyrics to find the true meaning of an artist’s lyrics. This framework is called the Outkast Imagination.” It was inspired by her love of HipHop culture and deep appreciation for the influences and foundational principles of hiphop.

I have been pleasantly surprised at the connections the students made to this framework. We used it to analyze the lyrics in the Decode the Message and Layers of Injustice sections.  During class, we listened to the verses and discussed which element of the framework did they associate with the lyrics. 

One of the strongest parts of this project is the reach for all students. For those students that had some computing experience, they jumped straight into Earsketch and even created songs outside of class. Also, those students that already wrote music loved the connection between coding and music creation. 

This is a great project! It is crucial that all students, particularly the ones who have been historically marginalized feel seen, included, value, and know that their VOICES HAVE POWER!!

Thank you for your work on this project and thank you for creating this video and sharing your work related to mentoring in STEM classrooms and collaborative relationships. I enjoyed hearing about Ms. Wright and Ms. Boachie’s collaboration!