Hopkinsville Community College has been awarded its first National Science Foundation grant, a $200k award through the Advanced Tech Education program. It's called "Technological Education for the Rural Community" and focuses on access, low math comprehension and employability. On Sounds Good, Kate Lochte speaks with faculty members Sherry McCormack of math and Stuart Zieman of industrial electronics to learn more about their project.
One of the goals for this funding is to recruit students from underrepresented groups: women, minorities and rural students and place them in highly technical positions within industries in the region. These are groups, Zieman says, that typically feel these types of jobs aren't available to them and this effort helps give them the skills they need to be put in the pipeline. He says there are very few women in the industrial technical field and believes that at some point in childhood girls tend to be guided away from hands-on skills. Hopkinsville Community College will be trying to reach out to young women through this opportunity, specifically to those who enjoy tinkering on their car or fixing things around the house.
Zieman says if you look at the demographics of current technical maintenance positions, it's a predominately white field. Reaching out to minority groups through this effort will be to demonstrate that one can go to college without taking out loans, that through working in an industry that industry can help pay for school. In rural communities, it's simply a matter of knowing that opportunities exist in a high-demand field and that HCC offers a hybridization model of learning through this grant that allows for expanded accessibility.
The program is expected to launch August 2015 and will be tailored to entry-level classes: basic electricity and basic agriculture. They've found that students often come into HCC with developmental math needs. For the math aspect of this grant, McCormack says they'll be implementing a 'contextualization' model of identifying math problems they might encounter in the workplace, rather than learning broad theories of algebra or trigonometry, and work to solve these problems through trial and error and to understand multiple pathways to the solution.
By allowing students to spend some time to develop problem-based learning, she says, it can help students transition from theories of math to real-life, practical applications. Many of these math and industrial problems come from partnerships from regional industries, who offered some of the issues they might typically encounter.
Zieman says his students are typically in their mid 30s with a family and a job, so a typical class schedule means they'd potentially miss lectures. They've found industries going to a 24/7 model, operating in four crews: two days on, two days off, three days on, three days off shifts. If you have a class that meets Mondays and Wednesdays, you'd miss class, he says. To remedy this, HCC is exploring a 'hybridization' model of putting materials online so that students can work on materials at home and come in for labs at their convenience.
For rural students who lack an internet connection, preloaded content will be available on thumb drives that can be plugged into a home computer or at the library. The in-classroom experience then focuses on tangible lab instruction and helping resolve specific math problems from the course work. Zieman says he's found that students learn better in a technical environment when they can get their hands on something, to fix things and break things and figure it out. Understanding the theory of electricity is one thing, he says, but actually doing it and learning how to do it safely can be more likely to lead to a skilled job in the industrial technical field.
Hopkinsville Community College faculty - Sherry McCormack, math and Stuart Zieman, industrial electronics - authored the first ever National Science Foundation grant the KCTCS college has received. Through NSF's Advanced Tech Education Program, their project is called "Technological Education for the Rural Community." It addresses access to education, low math comprehension and employability.
