 Good morning everyone. This is Meng and welcome to this edition of the celebrate our associate professor's series We started this about three years ago as a way to celebrate our recently tenured Professor associate professors in the College of Engineering here and also to recognize that There have been mentors have been collaborators along the process And we hope that those who are currently PhD students or postdocs or might be a assistant professors in tenure track would also benefit from listening to the research and Teaching and engagement activities of our recently tenured colleagues. We are immensely proud of all of our Tenured associate professors. I have been directly involved in many of the tenured cases and equally importantly it is to build a community of Our colleagues in a way that can encourage more collaboration and conversation and to encourage each and every one of them to now think really big without the typical worry and As an assistant professor about the tenured process. So warm congratulations to the four speakers today And with that I turn it to I think maybe to Arvin if you are there. Yeah, and you know to we have This is this is the last COAP event and without further ado. It's my honor to To introduce Donna Rodney the Kamiar Hagee Head of the School of Engineering Education to introduce our first two speakers and do the Q&A sessions for them to over to you Donna Thanks, Arvin, and I'm sorry if my internet connection to problem I think both both Mung and Arvin were chopped up for me. So I hope it's not me, but it probably is me But it's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Jennifer DeBoer Jennifer attained her PhD in international education Policy studies from Vanderbilt University in 2012. She holds two bachelor degrees From MIT in both mechanical engineering and foreign languages and before joining our faculty in engineering education at Purdue in 2014 she served as a postdoc in Education research at MIT. And so as you might imagine from this set of Unique backgrounds Jennifer's work is Truly unique in the world She focuses on international education systems Individual and social development technology use and STEM learning and educational environments for diverse for diverse learners And I'm sure that she'll be talking more about kind of how that how that plays out in different parts of the world But I think one of the most unique things about her work is her studies with this with displaced people Around the world. So that includes homeless folks here in the US Folks whose lives are disrupted by violence on other continents and in particular she She works with those folks to leverage engineering education as a tool both to improve the Immediate environments which they work and to facilitate opportunities for Permanent relocation. So with that I'll turn it over to Jennifer. And thank you Donna. That's a perfect introduction For what I'm going to focus on in my talk Again, my name is Jennifer the bore and I'm of course an associate professor now of engineering education with a courtesy appointment in mechanical engineering Director of research of the mechanical engineering education research center your cat at Purdue and As Dr. Riley said my research group studies the pedagogical technological and policy tools that can support marginalized learners creating solutions for their own communities and as I was reflecting in preparation for this talk On where I'm at And this brief opportunity to share I was thinking about this place in my career And realized right now this this whole timeframe parallels the the full life cycle of one of my projects And in particular one that I'm focusing on in this talk Localized engineering and displacement So I'll talk about this as an example and reflect on how my work has evolved But this in a full circle over the last six or seven years Reflects some of the other work that I do in mechanical engineering education tools online learning and broadening participation So what I'm showing on this first slide is a map of a refugee camp that was designed as a temporary solution In this case, it was a temporary solution to the Syrian crisis And this camp was built in 2014 and it was built as an emergency response is built to be taken down Seven years later. It's become really permanent in infrastructure. It's a permanent fixture in the desert in northeastern Jordan And it really illustrates the Tension that's inherent in displacement and that has become a core facet to my research Really understanding how what is treated as an emergency that requires immediate often less robust humanitarian aid solutions Is becoming a long-term situation? And again as as Donna had said displacement in my work and include Cross-border migration like the Syrian crisis which is moving people into Jordan internal displacement like the current Fast-growing crisis in the Tigray region in Ethiopia or homelessness and the challenge of being unhoused And whether it's in the US or in Kenya, which is the example that I'm going to be Displacement is often addressed as a short-term crisis rather than what it realistically turns into Which is a more long-term Systemic issue that requires more robust technical solutions And so this causes a number of technical needs to arise Including things like food insecurity Energy systems as communities are uprooted existing systems are uprooted. So as communities move to another place and they have to Reestablish their ties a number of of technical needs arise And so one of the major developments in my work in this first phase of my career has been the development of an engineering education solutions to Which is recentering and relocalizing the expertise that is needed to solve these technical problems building on concepts like an ethics of care Asset-based frameworks and funds of knowledge in what we've started calling localized engineering and displacement a model for Responding to and and closing the the loop to the displacement issue So this model uses active learning activities, which we know from Myriad research is better for students learning Blended tools, which includes online and face-to-face and has allowed us to be fairly adaptable in our cross-national work, especially during COVID times on Collaborative learning where we have local teams of learners in displaced communities Collaborating with each other on the ground collaborating with my team here at Purdue and collaborating with partners around the world and Democratic learning where students themselves are deciding what needs should be addressed and how by their solutions so this curricular model re-centers the students and the local local expertise and The example that I'll trace is in collaboration with students and teachers at the Tumayani Innovation Center Which is an alternative school for homeless youth in Kenya, which has been a close collaborator since Every first year here starting out with a seed grant from what is now called the Shah Lab for international development So the the four research aims in my work in this example that I'll go through really illustrate how my work has evolved Since I came to Purdue in 2014 So we began by focusing on the students were at the center of this focusing on their learning and asking research questions Like what are the engineering ways of thinking and being? What can we learn about students self-efficacy and self-concept as an engineer in this learning environment? And what are the psychosocial measures of well-being that we see students achieve? We're using methods and methodologies like qualitative interviews and observations Text assessments and motivational and attitudinal surveys. So you can see here students early on in our work Explaining technical concepts in solar photovoltaic systems and power calculations To the US ambassador to Kenya who is visiting Tumayani at the time So this was how our work started, but we very quickly then realized that in order to To foster local learning and work with students. We had to collaborate with teachers So very quickly the second phase of this research evolved into fostering local expertise and collaborating with teachers With the research aim of teacher development and this is largely been through methods like teacher action research and the facilitation of a community of practice Qualitative interviews and things like what you see in this picture One of the teachers completing a series of journaling prompts as part of teacher action research And I want to note here too that this is very illustrative of our teacher collaborators at Tumayani the majority of the teachers we worked with Early on and even now we're women who are in leadership and teaching roles for predominantly male students As our implementation work evolved we continued a longer thread of my scholarship which has been taking a really fine-grain and critical look at the learning behaviors and technologies That students are using where these work and where they don't and for whom So looking at the student learning behaviors as they're using digital tools like the ones that you see here Where we can use inferential statistics and data mining to actually track what students are doing See how they study how they answer questions and are how they're developing a conceptual understanding of engineering while using educational technologies Like this one. So that's been a really long-term ongoing thrust of our work and Finally the keystone and really the main future direction for this work is Collaborating on research teaching research skills to our students and our partners So they can lead on developing new knowledge and continuing the research and development that's necessary for really closing the this life cycle of Localizing engineering in this placement that has often meant participatory research methods And here you see the director of the center overseeing both Tumayani students actually produce study abroad students Researching and trialing a microcontroller solution to a need that they had identified and learned relevant concepts for And iterated and developed the solution and actually later on the same day they themselves were conducting market research so the Purdue and Tumayani students were learning while doing going out into the community to conduct market research and The result of that market research is this last step in The life cycle that has just happened in the last couple months So about six years of this story from start to finish Which is a small business proposal for a solar-powered security system at households across the local capsoid community around Tumayani are interested in purchasing And just now a couple months ago One national business accelerator grant for $30,000 and that in Belly Nabi's competition, which means move the business forward So you see the student here who's going to be the lead on the small business and he'll actually be leading along with a co-founder Who's one of the women teachers and oversees the engineering course at Tumayani So this is really the life cycle of localized engineering displacement moving from formerly homeless youth who have been displaced To learning not just learning a trade but learning to engineer solutions developing a solution based on their newly rooted understanding of their their local host community to building a solution and Not just building temporary shelters But but what we're calling building for life and reestablishing community to close the loop and reroute So with that I want to thank of course my whole group I'm here not just as myself, but as my research group the students and collaborators we work with my mentors the engineering education community Purdue and of course on the Shah lab and NSF I Was going to ask you. What would you tell your earlier self that you know now? I Wouldn't I would probably say To have a little bit more faith in yourself and that When there are hard decisions that you know that you have to take Stick stick with it And I think that would have been helpful to my earlier self not that I didn't Stick with what we I think knew was the the right path, but it can be hard sometimes You know when you guys don't come through or you're doing something that's like a little bit different So I think that's that would be the the message. Thank you. Glad you're here Thanks, I see our been waiting Speaking of technical abilities, I didn't figure out the ability to raise my hand on this I Jennifer, you know, I've been so delighted to so proud and delighted to see how All your engagement and research and it's hard to distinguish what's research what's engagement and how they've Expanded and I just wanted to also You know for the benefit of everyone also You know just just add a piece to this that you know Jennifer's group has become probably one of the key you know linchpins if you will of You know our engagement in western Kenya You know, we now have a what is it a building in the IU? You know Complex there. That's you know, thank you Jennifer new house for the Purdue house within the IU house So that's great. Just I guess a question was maybe reflecting on You know, you jumped into this international piece and then you know, there wasn't probably an interaction that happened Right, so you initially went in maybe with a seed grant and you know to do certain things But it's clearly seeing you know looking at looking back at how that interaction shaped You know your own future research agenda You know, can you speak to how? Interacting in the field and the reason I bring it up is that you know, some faculty may you know may hesitate, you know from jumping into You know going along the path that you did But maybe if you can speak to how that field experience helped shape your own research vision moving forward And your own engagement mission teaching mission going forward if you could speak to that Yeah, that's a good question. Um, I think um, I Think it's it's we as researchers are trained to Kind of be experts and defend our expertise. I think one of the things that's been really valuable being in the field has been Learning all the things that I don't know and it's I think sometimes hard and for us as researchers to to say we don't know things but Working with collaborators in a number of different places has allowed. I think it strengthened my research Because it has pointed out all of the things that that I don't know all the failure point all the ways in which Technologies and solutions can fail that if we're just kind of focusing on Experiments in the lab work. We're not really going to be testing solutions in all of the conditions under which they can they can fail So that I think has been important for my research and I'll show one of the Additional slides that I had that just kind of shows all of the different The number of students that we've we've come into contact with and I put a note up here This doesn't even include the the hundreds of students in the global learning community section of 131 who are seeing Exactly what what you're kind of asking about That working in the real world and working in a number of different diverse field conditions Allows us to to be better engineers because it points out all of the ways that all the things that we don't know which is really valuable