RET Site: Researching Cellular Agriculture: Bridging engineering and plant science to cultivate future engineering teachers.

This three-year RET Site: Researching Cellular Agriculture: Bridging Engineering and Plant Science to Cultivate Future Engineering Teachers is hosted by Boston College. The project draws upon emerging trends in cellular agriculture and STEM education and prepares high school teachers to teach engineering. Engineering teachers at the high school level may often have no or limited backgrounds in engineering and are understandably hesitant to teach concepts in which they lack fluency.

The field of cellular agriculture can offer opportunities for teachers and their students to engage in cutting-edge research while working on sustainability-related projects. STEM educators will work with researchers and educators at Boston College to conduct research in cellular agriculture while developing enhanced pedagogical skills related to making, building, and engineering design that are also applicable to the contexts in which they teach.

These kinds of activities and ways of teaching have proven to be helpful in learning engineering and STEM more broadly at the K-12 level. This project focuses on working with public school systems that serve students of all backgrounds in STEM.

High school teachers will conduct research in cellular agriculture, which offers a unique opportunity to explore cutting-edge bioengineering technology. Participants will work directly with researchers in the Human-Centered Engineering program at Boston College. The teachers will be immersed in pioneering research in a transdisciplinary learning environment where they will apply concepts from engineering, science, and learning science to co-design and test engineering lessons for their students.

The researchers will also have opportunities to conduct collaborative research and curriculum development with the teachers. This kind of collaborative effort will help researchers better understand teachers’ and students’ attitudes toward cellular agriculture, concepts of sustainability, and STEM careers, which will, in turn, support their future work in cellular agriculture.

The stakeholders, partnerships, and evaluation activities will help the project and participants develop new knowledge about K-12-university-industry partnerships, especially for newly emerging STEM research fields.

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.