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Building Bridges Between Education and Engineering Programs: An Example of a Successful Planning Process

Philip Parker, Jason Thrun University of Wisconsin-Platteville

Introduction

Three Engineering faculty members and three School of Education faculty members at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville (UWP) have teamed up to introduce engineering fundamentals to pre-service teachers. The philosophy behind this project is that teacher education is the responsibility of the entire university, not simply the School of Education. As such, this project has four goals listed below. The first two goals focus on the pre-service teachers participating in the project and the second two goals are for the faculty involved:

provide pre-service teachers with a basic understanding of the field of engineering so they are better able to describe the excitement of an engineering career to their future students; provide pre-service teachers with engineering applications that can enhance the learning of mathematics; introduce fundamental issues relating to engineering and engineering education to faculty members outside the field of engineering; improve pedagogy and teaching effectiveness of engineering faculty.

To meet these goals, we planned and implemented a model for an engineering experience for pre-service teachers. This experience pairs an existing 1-credit-hour class (GE1030 - Introduction to Engineering Projects) with a bi-weekly seminar. The use of an existing course rather than an entirely new course is intended to make eventual implementation at UWP more likely.

This paper focuses on the intensive planning and professional development that occurred during the Summer of 2004 to implement the pilot offering of the GE1030 course and seminar to the pre-service teachers during the Fall 2004 semester. The implementation of this course is described in another paper presented at this conference.

Planning Process

The faculty team met nearly every week during the Summer of 2004. Prior to the summer, we had recruited students to the course. To recruit student volunteers, the project designers advertised a stipend of $750 and a collection of resource books. The project was advertised in three ways. A letter describing the project was sent to students who were elementary/middle and secondary education majors with emphases in mathematics or science and who were

Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright , American Society for Engineering Education

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Parker, P., & Thrun, J. (2005, June), Building Bridges Between Education And Engineering Programs: An Example Of A Successful Planning Process Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--14442