Collaboration crucial to boosting workforce skills

COURTESY RI STEM CENTER
STEM SELLS: Dominique Fernandez, left, credits her new job at Lifespan to her participation in Year Up Providence. At right is Mary Sullivan, director, RI STEM Center.
COURTESY RI STEM CENTER STEM SELLS: Dominique Fernandez, left, credits her new job at Lifespan to her participation in Year Up Providence. At right is Mary Sullivan, director, RI STEM Center.

Dominique Fernandez’s life could have been very different.
Where the 20-year-old recently found salvation in the form of a desk-analyst position with the Lifespan health care system, she could have faced a future of, at best, minimum-wage jobs that wouldn’t have done much to break her out of the poverty-level – and sometimes sub-poverty – existence she struggled through as a child and teenager in a drug-filled environment.
“[When] I grew up, there was no heat, no food, no electricity. My life needed a change,” Fernandez said to an audience at Rhode Island College’s recent STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) conference.
“I [went] from dealing with drugs [to] working for one of the largest companies [in the state],” she said.
Her journey turned with the Providence branch of Year Up, a national organization dedicated to helping urban youth turn their lives toward economic self-sufficiency through education and support.
The program is not a part of RIC’s RI STEM Center and neither was Fernandez. Rather, she’s a real-life example of the success those deep within STEM’s trenches hope to see as they and others try to agree on how best to protect the state’s economic future by developing a new kind of workforce.
“She hasn’t worked with us, but [she’s] typical of the kids we are seeing,” said Mary Sullivan, professor of mathematics and educational studies and director of the RI STEM Center. “We’re trying to intervene earlier.”
Sullivan brought Fernandez in to speak at the May 4 conference in order to prove a point – that collaboration between service organizations, educational institutions and secondary schools is vital to teach skills universally identified here as direly needed to fill available jobs and those that could be created by developing the so-called Knowledge District.
Opened in February 2009 with funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health – as well as other sources – the STEM Center was established to improve the quality of STEM education in the state under recommendations made by the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Panel and PK-16 Advisory Committees several years before. Since then, other local institutions have begun STEM-centered projects, some independent of each other and some directed in a cooperative manner.
Brown University in Providence in 2010 established a School of Engineering, developed from engineering’s division within the university.
“[That] is one way in which Brown has made a strong commitment to applied research, which we know is at the heart of many commercial technological endeavors,” said Clyde Bryant, vice president for research.
Rhode Island School of Design in Providence in 2011 established its STEM to STEAM program, incorporating art and design into science and mathematics education to foster innovation.
A National Science Foundation-funded workshop organized largely by Christopher Rose, senior critic in furniture design and a principal investigator for RISD with Rhode Island’s division of the national EPSCoR – Experimental Program for Competitive Research – was its first contribution.
EPSCoR is a five-year, National Science Foundation program that supports interdisciplinary teaching and research.
Brown, RIC and the University of Rhode Island, in South Kingstown, all are involved. The schools are jointly seeking federal grant funding for marine-based educational programming.
“We have an ongoing vocabulary in developing expertise in these collaborative research activities,” Rose said. “[There’s an interest] in seeing how lessons to be learned from this collaborative research can filter down to younger age groups in the educational system.”
To that end, the STEM Center has aligned with the Providence After School Alliance, which works to expand learning opportunities, including after-school and summer activities, for the city’s youth. It works most closely with the middle-school segment.
“We see that these kids are not going to get all that they need in the school day,” Sullivan said. “I’m very much aware of all that R.I. Department of Education is doing within the school day within [limits] of standards and assessments. I’ve also heard many folks in the business arena say [the schools need to do more].” Doing more earlier within the state’s secondary school system is exactly what Lou Mazzucchelli, director of the Slater Technology Fund Fellows Program and a visiting scholar at Brown’s School of Engineering, emphasized during his keynote address at the recent conference.
The tendency, he said, is to put emphasis and attention on post-secondary institutions because they can secure large research grants. The mistake in that, he added, is that not every potentially valuable and skilled future employee is going to college and those who do aren’t all being trained for jobs that actually may be waiting after graduation, such as those in biotechnical industries slated for the Knowledge District.
“My daughter was an anthropology major, and she’s babysitting,” Mazzucchelli said. “We know 12-year-olds can hack into computers. Why are we persisting in our belief that we can’t teach kids to program?”
Sullivan said she felt it was very well-received in that it brought to light different ways of looking at the Knowledge District’s development, “matching it to some of our realities.”
“Rhode Island has problems,” she said. “We have high unemployment, yet jobs go unfilled. If you were to build big biomed [facilities] and all the rest I’ve heard proposed, we don’t have folks in Rhode Island who can fill those positions. They’ll all [be from] out of state. So how does that help?”
The RI Stem Center also places RIC education students into those after-school programs to experience, as Sullivan said, “hands-on pedagogy and wonder of discovery in young people’s eyes.”
RISD recently ran two STEM to STEAM mini-institutes for SmART Schools, a research-based, K-12 reform initiative that incorporates the arts into academic cores, so that middle and high school teachers can integrate design into their classrooms.
“We are living in an unprecedented age of connectivity,” Rose said. “Everybody has particular contributions that they can make and the world of science and technology needs every possible form of creative intelligence that is available.” •

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