Engineering Encounters: Teaching Educators about Engineering

Overview & Synopsis

This column presents ideas and techniques to enhance science teaching. This month's issue describes preservice elementary teachers learning engineering principles from engineers. Few elementary teachers have experience with implementing engineering into the classroom. While engineering professional development opportunities for inservice teachers are becoming more numerous, engineering education is rarely required or even offered in elementary teacher-preparation programs. To prepare future elementary teachers to teach engineering, a collaborative partnership was formed between professors in Iowa State University's College of Engineering (CoE) and School of Education (SoE). The partnership included teacher education faculty in science and mathematics education and three engineering faculty who provided perspectives on content, knowledge, and skills foundational to engineering. Members of the partnership worked together to co-plan and co-implement engineering experiences across a teacher education program. These experiences included building engineering content knowledge through a Saturday short course, inclusion of engineering in methods courses, and a summer workshop that preceded a partnership with an engineering graduate student. This article describes the Saturday short course provided to prospective elementary teachers by three members of the engineering faculty and two from the teacher education faculty.