Nilakanta, R., & Biasetti, G., & Nambisan, S. S. (2012, June), An Unusual Partnership: Transportation Engineering Outreach and Spanish Translation Program  Paper presented at 2012 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, San Antonio, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--20942

\bibitem{asee_peer_20942}
  Nilakanta, R., \& Biasetti, G., \& Nambisan, S. S. (2012, June), \emph{An Unusual Partnership: Transportation Engineering Outreach and Spanish Translation Program}
  Paper presented at 2012 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, San Antonio, Texas.
  10.18260/1-2--20942

Rema Nilakanta, Giada Biasetti, and Shashi S. Nambisan P.E..  "An Unusual Partnership: Transportation Engineering Outreach and Spanish Translation Program".  2012 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, San Antonio, Texas, 2012, June.  ASEE Conferences, 2012.  https://peer.asee.org/20942 Internet.  18 May, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_20942}
  Rema Nilakanta, Giada Biasetti, and Shashi S. Nambisan P.E..
  "An Unusual Partnership: Transportation Engineering Outreach and Spanish Translation Program".
  \emph{2012 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, San Antonio, Texas, 2012, June}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2012.
  https://peer.asee.org/20942 Internet.  18 May, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_20942
author = "Rema Nilakanta, Giada Biasetti, and Shashi S. Nambisan P.E."
title = "An Unusual Partnership: Transportation Engineering Outreach and Spanish Translation Program"
booktitle = "2012 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition"
year = "2012"
month = "June"
address = "San Antonio, Texas"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/20942}
number = {10.18260/1-2--20942}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  -          An Unusual Partnership: Transportation Engineering Outreach                   and Spanish Translation ProgramThe field of transportation is facing significant challenges. Its workforce is declining due to anincreased number of people retiring, a smaller hiring pool due to reduced birth rates in the 1980s,and a low labor force growth rate. However, the demand for transportation has increaseddramatically since 1990. Attracting young people to transportation careers and educationalopportunities has become critical.Workforce development includes identifying, attracting, and retaining individuals, particularlyfrom the pre-college age group from diverse backgrounds (demographic, ethnic, socio-cultural,etc.) to address the myriad challenges found in a heterogeneous population that is becoming evenmore diverse. For example, the proportion of the Spanish speaking population in the US hasincreased over the past two decades and stands at 16.3% (2010 US Census). This rate of increaseis expected to continue into the future.The transportation community recognizes the workforce development need and has initiatedsteps to develop a focused effort to attract middle and high school students to transportationcareers. One of these efforts involves two web-based sister publications: Go! and ¡Vamos! inEnglish and Spanish, respectively. These e-zines contain short articles on people, technology,and careers in transportation as well as curricular connections to STEM (Science, Technology,Engineering, and Mathematics) content. This paper discusses creative strategies employed indeveloping and sustaining ¡Vamos! and the unanticipated results that continue to surprise theresearchers and developers.¡Vamos! was initiated in 2009 at a large university in the Midwest with one-year seed fundingfrom the state. It was created as the Spanish equivalent of the English magazine Go! and wasdesigned to reach the increasing number of Hispanic students entering the US school system.The publishers explored options to sustain ¡Vamos! beyond the 1 year of seed funding. In August2010 ¡Vamos! initiated a tentative working relationship with the Spanish academic program atthe university. The partnership began as a class experiment in a Spanish translation course wherestudents translated English articles from Go! into Spanish for ¡Vamos!. The class project quicklyevolved into a promising internship program involving students, faculty, and the Spanish-speaking community members. This unusual network of support has sustained ¡Vamos!. Further,this initiative has helped raise awareness among non-transportation student interns abouttransportation as a field of study and career. This approach also seems to be an effective teachingstrategy for language learning. Preliminary findings of changes in student perceptions oftransportation and learning outcomes will be presented at the conference.In addition to the new partnership, ¡Vamos! website underwent a major redesign in 2011summer, which transformed the site from an information disseminating portal to a dynamicforum aimed at engaging students directly and actively in transportation topics. Since theredesign of ¡Vamos! has recently been completed, meaningful web statistics for ¡Vamos! are notcurrently available. However, several months of data should be available in time for thesubmission of the draft paper and significantly more data will be available for the final paper andfor presentation at the 2012 Annual Conference.
AU  - Rema Nilakanta
AU  - Giada Biasetti
AU  - Shashi S. Nambisan P.E.
CY  - San Antonio, Texas
DA  - 2012/06/10
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - An Unusual Partnership: Transportation Engineering Outreach and Spanish Translation Program
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/20942
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--20942
ER  -