| NSF Org: |
DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | March 25, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | May 29, 2018 |
| Award Number: | 1523905 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Heather Watson
DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education EDU Directorate for STEM Education |
| Start Date: | January 1, 2015 |
| End Date: | December 31, 2018 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $197,755.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $197,755.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO ALBUQUERQUE NM US 87131-0001 (505)277-4186 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
NM US 87131-0001 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Advanced Tech Education Prog |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.076 |
ABSTRACT
This project is developing and hosting two workshops, one each year of the project, that are helping build collaborations between regional technical workforce employers and New Mexico two-year community college faculty. During these workshops, faculty and regional industry personnel will develop outcome-based measures of needed engineering technician and engineering skills, industry sponsored student projects, and topics for short training classes for current engineering technicians and engineers.
This project leverages New Mexico's rural Native American and Hispanic students' cultural values of natural resource stewardship in project based work to help them succeed. The industry sponsored student projects and instructional activities that are being developed are combining real-world industry problems, technology, field research, and student project work in transformative ways to engage rural New Mexico's two-year community college students. This project's intellectual merit is in making the rigors of technical education relevant to rural community college students and preparing these students to serve in the growing regional technical workforce. The establishment of a permanent Industry Advisory Committee helps maintain a connection between New Mexico State University (NMSU) Grants, other New Mexico two-year community colleges, and the regional technical workforce employers in a way that enables continued relevance and growth of NMSU Grants' and New Mexico's engineering technician and engineering programs. The broader impacts of this project are being realized through the distribution of the learning outcomes, materials, and industry projects and contacts with New Mexico two-year community college faculty and the broader ATE community through annual conference participation.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
New Mexico is a community held together by its natural, cultural, and economic identities. These three identities make up our society. From the rural agricultural communities spread along our rivers, to the vast pastureland, and our technology centers, complete with various world renown research facilities, New Mexico's identities are the key to its communities.
The goal of this project was to build an impactful and sustainable community of academics and industry in New Mexico to support student success in technology careers. I'm calling this our Community. The project's real success is truly measured by the Community we've built, and this can be seen in the growth and success of the research center COSMIAC.
Each aspect of the trinity of the broader New Mexico community: nature, culture, and economy are equally important to our Community. I had a group of students design and create a three-piece painting of the State of New Mexico, one for each identity. Painting and art have a way of mirroring our values, dreams, and experiences, and what better way, I think, to captivate and engage than to use art to convey the outcomes of this project.
The heritage of painting and art is especially powerful in New Mexico and one of the reasons I made it my purpose to complete this project with an art piece that could communicate what this project was all about. I wanted a way to share the results of our research and findings in a way that would both facilitate the growth of our Community and also whose implementation would satisfy the goal of reaching and teaching students through project work. These paintings are the culmination of the ideas and experiences that went into it, were birthed during it, and now come forth from it.
In New Mexico, we have a special connection to nature and the outdoors. This may be due in part to the fact that there is just so much of it out here, but there is something remarkable about the fact that though New Mexico has been settled for thousands of years, and even by Europeans for longer than any other portion of the continental US, yet it remains one of the most wild and vast places in our nation. That with the fact that New Mexico is home to at least two of the most advanced research facilities in our nation, Sandia National Labs and Los Alamos National Lab, and it is the birth place of nuclear weapons technology, makes New Mexico seem all the more interesting the closer that you look.
A community and its culture are remarkably powerful and influencing factors in the manifestation of the economic activities that evolve to sustain it. The trinity of societal identities: nature, cultural, and economic that make up that community have an especially distinct flavor in New Mexico, and any persons, conquests, or institutions seeking to direct change to that community or even simply abide in it, will do well to take heed and know it.
As a person who grew up in a rural community in New Mexico, and having taught across the state, I believe that as diverse as we New Mexicans are, we also share core values that make us a community. Despite our varied ethnic backgrounds and histories, our New Mexican values are uniquely related to the wildness of our state, the culture that we adore, and the economy that sustains us. We are united by all three identities and our separation as a people is both defined and enhanced by the state's terrain.
Family and tradition are as powerful a force in New Mexico as the four winds and the torrential flash floods, as life giving as the irrigated fields, and as comforting as the shelter of adobe walls. As a teacher, I've heard every reason why a student succeeds or doesn't, as a faculty member, I've been part of every effort to increase enrollment and student engagement. Now as I reflect on the meaning of it all, I've come to accept, in part the length of time required to sow change in a community as well established and rooted as New Mexico's. This length of change matches the depth of tradition and culture that have imprinted on us, the way the weather imprints against the rock outcrop, the desert bluff. Whose consistent and melodic buffeting sandstone chisel reminds me to persevere in my work. So as the bluffs cast a respite shadow for pinon and juniper, it also provides stone for our pueblos. We wake and warm to the sunrise, and work our fields for store, the seasons marked with feasts, and the sun cast dials on our art, our joy, and our future. Because, New Mexico is where nature, culture, and economy remain bound together.
Last Modified: 11/04/2019
Modified by: Jonathan C Hebert
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