Greenway Institute of Elizabethtown College Center for Sustainability and Equity in Engineering

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

This project will broaden participation in engineering by creating the Greenway Center for Equity and Sustainability (GCES). GCES will be dedicated to recruiting and retaining a diverse community of students who are all equally included, engaged, and enabled to develop their professional skills and engineering identities regardless of socioeconomic status or race.

Most traditional engineering programs embody biases and practices that perpetuate inequity: grading schemes that immediately rank students, competitive and isolating work cultures, emphasis on passive lectures, and isolation from the impact of real-world engineering. This disadvantages students whose opinions and talents are underrepresented in the engineering profession, including underrepresented racial minorities, women, students from rural locations, Pell-eligible students, and/or first-generation students.

GCES will target programs (including teacher professional development) and outreach in communities with larger numbers of underrepresented students to ensure that the students, teachers, and faculty we serve, and employ are diverse. We will also recruit diverse mentors to sponsor students into engineering. GCES will combine Elizabethtown College’s ABET-accredited engineering program and longstanding experience working with these student groups with the Greenway Institute’s project-based learning curriculum and focus on sustainability.

GCES will be a supportive, inclusive community where every student can develop the competence, confidence, and connections they need to thrive in engineering by learning engineering through hands-on, teamwork-based projects that address real-world problems. Because this innovation will occur in a resource constrained environment, its potential replicability across other such settings is enhanced.

This two-year program will pilot a fully problem-based curriculum that includes (1) design and implementation of engineering education for equity and sustainability and (2) training of faculty to design and deliver equity-focused engineering instruction that strengthens the engineering identity and success of students from underrepresented groups. In Year 1, learning outcomes will be specified and a one-year, 100% hands-on pilot program in sustainable engineering developed, Sustainable Engineering for Equity (SEE).

SEE will be organized around eight learning modules, each focused on a different engineering challenge. Modules will be structured to progressively develop the engineering skills that first-year students should master and will be specifically based on mastery proficiency milestones and outcomes specified by ABET. Hands-on, supportive project work will be paired with contextualized, just-in-time instruction to make sure students have strong mastery of math and science fundamentals and plenty of opportunities to practice, revise, and improve their work.

In Year 2, faculty will pilot the one-year SEE program with a sample of students that includes strong representation from our target groups. SEE will enable the GCES to hone its practices, train its faculty, and set up infrastructure to support a fully inclusive, equitable engineering program. The impact of redesigning engineering education around equitable practices on underrepresented students’ sense of engineering identity will be rigorously evaluated.

Data and feedback from SEE will help Elizabethton College and GCES faculty redesign their courses to incorporate field-tested best practices. SEE students in the Phase I pilot will receive free tuition and credit for a full year of engineering education; after successfully completing the year, students can continue at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania or another institution of higher education.

Project evaluation by a contracted third-party expert will (1) provide information on accountability of the GCES with respect to both fidelity of GCES implementation of grant activities and our stated commitment to equitable impacts, (2) support continuous improvement of work developed in the SEE pilot, and (3) support generation of knowledge about how engineering education can be redesigned for equity, in ways that can be transferred to other campuses. In Phase II, the GCES will begin extension of the model program into a full, four-year engineering program.

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.