Calvin Mackie - US grants

Graduate Alliance for Education in Louisiana

PROJECT SUMMARY

We propose to establish an alliance for increasing diversity in graduate education and the professoriate in Louisiana. Alliance partners will include Tulane and Louisiana State University (the two Carnegie Research I universities in the state and the institutions responsible for 94% of the minority doctoral degree production in the state between 1994-2001), Xavier University of Louisiana, Dillard University, and Southern University Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The Graduate Alliance for Education in Louisiana (GAELA) will build upon existing minority SME research training programs at these institutions, and develop new programs to encourage more minority students to pursue SME graduate education and academic careers. One of the goals of the GAELA project will be the early identification and nurturing of promising students during their undergraduate years. A concerted effort will be made to recruit doctoral fellows from participants in LS-LAMP, the College Fund - Xavier AMP, and other pre-graduate training programs in the state. We expect that the nurturing students receive in these programs, and the familiarity they gain working with faculty at Tulane and LSU will increase their chances of successfully completing their doctoral training.

The second major goal of the GAELA Program will be to affect significant change in the culture of graduate education at the State of Louisiana's top research universities in order to significantly increase minority SME doctoral degree production. We have set a numerical goal of 45 Ph.D. per year by 2006, more than triple the 2001 annual output on minority doctoral degrees. The project has a strong component of recruitment and early exposure of students to academic career opportunities focused on participating HBCU's, and a variety of retention activities focused on the two graduate research institutions.

The recruitment component consists of exposing students at HBCU's to study and academic career opportunities at LSU and Tulane through recruiting visits by LSU and Tulane faculty, annual recruitment fairs on Tulane and LSU campuses, and involving HBCU students in Tulane/LSU faculty-mentored research. We will establish GAELA campus programs at Xavier, Dillard, SUBR and SUNO to coordinate these activities. The retention component will consist of mentoring workshops for Tulane and LSU faculty, awarding research funds and professional travel grants to doctoral students that are making satisfactory progress toward completing their degrees, SME academic career training sessions, and #I survival sessions" for helping minority students cope with the majority graduate educational environment.

HRD 03-28648
Dr. Calvin Mackie is a tenured Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering who has an extensive body of mentoring and outreach activities for pre-college, undergraduate, and graduate populations. His program works to encourage and inspire individuals to personal and academic achievement. He communicates through high-energy education and motivational presentations.

As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants. This two-year Pilots and Feasibility project seeks to build knowledge and strategic impact in the informal STEM learning field by studying how and why science-education-art collaborations yield impactful informal STEM learning experiences. By design and implementing interactive and participatory experiences for adult audiences, this project will build knowledge about how to help communities learn about environmental science and apply scientific knowledge to environmental decision-making in their lives.

The project?s two overarching research questions are: (1) What are the essential elements of collaboration among scientists, educators, and artists that support learning about adaptation in a changing environment? (2) In what ways do designed, participatory, informal science learning experiences support participant learning? This pilot project will: a) develop methods for facilitating and assessing collaboration among scientists, educators, and artists; b) pilot and refine approaches for engaging scientists, educators, and artists with community members for high quality participatory experiences focus on learning about adaptation to environmental change in informal learning settings; c) pilot and refine methods to measure the outcomes for community participants on knowledge about environmental change and its application to problems in their everyday lives. This project is innovative in bridging a diverse body of scholarship in order to study the process of collaboration and the specific ways interdisciplinary collaborations foster learning. Because informal STEM learning settings often combine the work of multiple disciplines, examining the process and outcomes of collaborative, participatory STEM learning has the potential to deliver widely applicable guidance for achieving more impactful educational outcomes.

The proposed project will broaden participation by engaging adult members of environmentally vulnerable communities in participatory STEM activities and will improving individual and community well-being by delivering tools for future decision-making. The collaborative project will build valuable partnerships and capacity between disparate sectors of society, allowing co-learning and co-production of knowledge. Results will be published in scholarly journals as well as shared with community participants.

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.