Wayne Community College (WCC) is partnering with the South Carolina Advanced Technological Education (SC ATE) National Resource Center and Bristol Community College (BCC) to create Project-based Learning (PBL) Scenarios for a new sustainability technology program. This project addresses the educational needs of two-year community college students, underrepresented secondary students, and high school and community college faculty. The project provides secondary and post-secondary faculty with professional development activities and gives them the opportunity to develop, test, and implement PBL scenarios. The project is based upon WCC's previous success, new curriculum, expanded partnerships, increased student interest, and local industry support. Grant objectives are that 80% of the PBL cohort is retained and successfully completes the sustainability technology program. The intellectual merit of the project is that students are learning workplace readiness by using real work scenarios. Topics are broadly relevant to sustainable technology; career assessment, professional ethics, critical thinking, problem solving, and tools for engineering computations. The broader impact of the project is that this curriculum is the first of its kind in North Carolina. Project scenarios are incorporated into WCC and BCC's curriculum as well as the SC ATE Technology Gateway. Deliverables are also included within the nationally recognized and broadly disseminated SC ATE curriculum, the North Carolina Community College System and the North Carolina Learning Object Repository.
The Project Based Learning (PBL) for Sustainability Curriculum project was intended to fulfill the need for graduates to have more real-world problem solving experiences. This deficiency was originally identified by Progress Energy/Duke Progress officials along with other local industries on our Advisory Board. We were steered towards the national model of Project-Based Learning housed at the SCATE Center in Florence-Darlington, SC and subsequently joined their efforts to disseminate PBL more broadly. Working with our industry and education partners our goals were to train more faculty in the implementation of PBL as well as to empower them to create PBL scenarios for any materials to be taught. Our models for this professional development were concentrated in the sustainability arena because their is a noted lack of PBL materials concerning this subject. We have been successful in helping to lead this change towards contextualized, meaningful curriculum products for our students and for others having access to NSF-supported materials. We have broadened our relationships with other colleges using this approach and become part of the community of practice that is PBL. We have also strengthened our ties with local high schools in order to better support k-12 educators in providing effective instruction that prepares students for the advanced problem solving necessary to successful in higher education and career applications.
