The National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program focuses on enhancing technician education in advanced technology fields. It emphasizes education/industry partnerships and supports projects based primarily at two-year institutions of higher education across the country. ATE encourages and supports these institutions to extend their leading roles in educating the skilled technical workforce. The community and collaborations built by this program have had an impressive and ongoing impact on the development of the nation’s skilled technical workforce. The ATE Impacts book showcases this impact by representing the diversity of programs, students, faculty, and industry partners supported and amplified by the ATE program. The need to share information about the impact of technician education is critical as outlined in the National Science Board’s 2019 report, “The Skilled Technical Workforce: Crafting America’s Science & Engineering Enterprise.†The report discusses the need to improve the message about technician education and “communicate the importance of the STW to our nation’s S&E enterprise, individual economic prosperity, national security, and US global competitiveness.†This project will showcase outstanding examples of how technical education and messages about skilled technical careers are changing. It will also help strengthen partnerships, encourage community building, and support outreach and dissemination within and beyond ATE.
This project will develop a suite of deliverables designed to collect and share data about the impacts and outcomes of the ATE program, including the centers and projects the program funds and the valuable resources and activities these grantees develop and deploy. The project team will work collaboratively with the ATE community, the American Association of Community Colleges, Vox Television, and a project Advisory Board to help showcase the important role two-year community and technical colleges play in building the skilled technical workforce and provide evidence of the critical U.S. economic need for and impact of technician education, within and beyond ATE. The project will create the following set of deliverables: 1) Three new ATE Impacts print publications (2022, 2024, and 2026 editions), covering ATE centers and projects, their impacts, and the impacts of the whole ATE program; 2) Digital versions of the ATE Impacts editions, in both accessible PDF and interactive flipbook format; 3) Professionally-produced videos that illustrate individuals (student, faculty, industry partner) impacted by ATE, with a corresponding spread in the print and electronic publications; 4) An ATE Impacts Blog that will provide an ongoing series of examples from different segments of the ATE community, increasing the currency and relevance of the publications; 5) Audience- and subject-focused adaptable components to re-frame the ATE Impacts publication and blog content for use by ATE projects and centers and other stakeholders in outreach to specific audience segments; 6) A visual library that organizes the hundreds of photos gathered in the process of creating the ATE Impacts publications and makes them available for use by ATE projects and centers and others for promotional and educational use; 7) An ATE Impacts online portal to provide no-cost access to all of the deliverables. The content produced and managed for all of these deliverables will be offered and distributed under a Creative Commons license, to encourage maximum adoption, reuse, and impact. This project is funded by the Advanced Technological Education program that focuses on the education of technicians for the advanced-technology fields that drive the nation's economy.
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.
