BPE-Track 3: Inclusive mentoring hub for enabling pathways from inner-city and rural Appalachian households to engineering in Kentucky and West Virginia

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Poverty and lack of education are characteristics of both urban inner-city and rural Appalachian neighborhoods which limit individual and community growth and cycle through generations. There are few opportunities for overcoming these strong cultural barriers to success which results in a loss of significant talent and intellectual capacity from our STEM workforce.

This project will reach directly into the university STEM curriculum and the classrooms of inner-city and rural high schools to introduce STEM concepts, research methods, and workforce opportunities to the future engineers and scientists who are hidden in plain sight but do not know how to proceed. By working with university and high school faculty, we will identify students with the potential and interest to participate in engineering and STEM fields and directly support them with mentoring and financial assistance.

We will specifically focus our efforts on reaching students who are not at the top of the grading scale due to life struggles such as lack of family support or poor base academic skills. We will encourage student growth through relationships, by offering a supportive peer community, and mentoring by high school (Teacher Fellows) and university faculty and students, and also through introduction of technical content.

This project directly aligns with the Broadening Participation in Engineering program goals of not only supporting research in science and engineering but of broadening participation in engineering sciences through collaborative endeavors which foster professional development of a broad-based and well prepared STEM workforce. Throughout the program, the effectiveness of our methods will be evaluated to build a strong model for breaking the destructive cultural barriers limiting inner-city and rural Appalachian communities and facilitating a sustainable pathway to the STEM sciences for students from these regions.

Upon completion of the project, this knowledge and the relationships we have established with university and high school faculty will continue to provide a pathway for students to our programs and universities.

With an overarching goal of assisting students from the urban to rural gradient in overcoming barriers to attaining engineering and STEM careers, we propose an inclusive mentoring hub that is led by universities with service missions to support these students, including the University of Louisville in Kentucky, University of Kentucky, and Marshall University in West Virginia. We will establish mentoring relationships across multiple levels including college faculty, high school teachers, peer students, and between students from inner-city neighborhoods and rural Appalachia with a goal of providing support for marginalized students and providing scaffolding to support STEM development in individuals and communities.

Through developing relationships between university and high school faculty, we will introduce technical concepts and potential workforce opportunities in high school classrooms and recruit students for mentoring and support opportunities. These students will participate in a 10-month inclusive mentoring program designed to improve their STEM understanding and support their transition to viewing themselves as capable participants in the engineering and STEM workforce.

Throughout the program, our methods will be evaluated by learning and teaching professionals to improve all aspects of our program design. During the 5-year program, we anticipate impacting 35 undergraduate students, 35 graduate students, 35 high school teachers, and over 800 high school students while developing a template and a collaborative network for a sustainable pathway from the inner-city and rural Appalachian regions.

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.