2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

TRAILS is an integrated STEM education program designed to partner secondary teachers in engineering technology education with science teachers to implement integrated STEM curriculum. This year, an NSF scale-up grant was funded to continue research and implementation of the TRAILS project, TRAILS 2.0. The continuation of this work is now expanded to include a collaboration of partners. The TRAILS 2.0 project will address the needs of diverse populations in rural school settings. TRAILS seeks to impact underserved, underrepresented students living in rural America. Public schools in rural settings serve one-third of all students in the United States [1], [2]. Often little attention is given to prepare these youth for careers in STEM education and a lack in programs to improve rural science education remains [3]. Furthermore, multiple barriers exist for rural students who aspire to pursue a STEM career. The TRAILS 2.0 program is designed to help rural students overcome these challenges based on the situated learning theory to blend both physical and social elements of real-world learning within a community of practice to foster authentic learning [4], [5], [6], [7]. TRAILS 2.0 adds a focus on Place-based education (PBE) [8] that utilizes a framework for rural teachers to leverage local and indigenous knowledge of history, nature, habitats, culture, and the economy as context for learning STEM content [9], [10]. While remaining true to the integrated STEM conceptual framework foundational to TRAILS 1.0 [11], new theories assist TRAILS 2.0 researchers and teachers to reach these special populations of students. The paper will highlight new approaches both in pedagogy and research techniques to impact new audiences and prepare underserved students for pursuing STEM careers. The authors will illustrate how engineering technology education teachers using engineering design pedagogical approaches can also provide place-based learning by leveraging local rural knowledge within a community of practice to engage students. Preliminary findings on this new cohort of teachers and students is presented from this first year of TRAILS 2.0 implementation in this Work in Progress paper.