Discerning Advanced Manufacturing Education Pathways: Insights from Rural Northwest Florida’s Program Origin Stories

Last month in FLATE Focus you read an introduction to the collaborative advanced manufacturing (AM) Career Pathways project from Florida State University (FSU) and Chipola College (Chipola) working with FLATE, Pensacola State College (PSC), Gulf Coast State College (GCSC), Tallahassee Community College (TCC), and the Northwest Florida Manufacturing Consortium (NWFMC) on a 3-year NSF research project grant to document AM school-to-career pathways in rural Northwest Florida. This month we continue by sharing details from one project research activity: Discerning Advanced Manufacturing Education Pathways: Insights from Rural Northwest Florida’s Program Origin Stories.

In this study, we researched the stories and details of how AM education programs began. School-to-career pathways not only represent a students’ journey, but they also represent the educational program context. We built on existing knowledge of community colleges as local educational and economic anchors, rural community colleges and the manufacturing workforce, and two-year programs and advanced manufacturing curricula. One must understand the geographic, political, and social conditions that led to the program’s creation to understand the pathway. We explored how rural AM technician education programs evolved in organizational structure, curriculum content, employer relations, and student pathways facilitation. We used a multiple case study approach grounded in qualitative methods to address three questions with this study: (1) What are the commonalities and unique features of regional AM programs’ origins? (2) How do the curriculum, faculty, and students compare among the programs? (3) How do the challenges and priorities that AM programs experience in rural settings compare and contrast?

 Figure 1. Rural Northwest Florida’s AM Program Analysis Cases

We learned from interviews at each college that the programs (here represented by a color instead of the college name) were founded for different reasons and included unique stakeholders in their planning processes. Regardless of their varying origins, program administrators from the colleges illustrated in Figure 1 reported common challenges:

·         Identifying and hiring faculty who meet credentialing standards (all colleges);

·         Having only a small number of faculty (Yellow College and Blue College) specifically said

·         Serving students who preferred to attend classes part-time, at night, and/or on weekends

·         Increasing student diversity in the programs (Pink College, Red College, and Green College);

·         Including a variety of stakeholders to offer directly impactful two-year engineering technology and engineering technician education (all colleges);

·         Integrating changing curricula and certification requirements (all colleges); and

·         Collaborating with industry to identify critical technical skills for the region (all colleges).

Although their target students differed, the participating program faculty and administrators agreed that offering highly technical programs in rural settings required advanced physical spaces which require an ongoing commitment of appropriate financial resources, variously obtained from the institution, local employers, and/or some combination of external sources. To point, a dean from Yellow College said:

“This has to be industry led. We cannot be behind. We cannot be less than state of the art. Why would a college who’s trying to train people for industry, send somebody out who’s working on old tech? So, we’ve got to stay connected to that, and I think our industry sponsorships and programs will become a priority.”

Leaders and faculty from each participating AM program noted that their top priorities were also their main challenges. Our findings from this study justify further research of expectations and implementation needs related to AM policy, leadership roles, and economies in study rural AM technician education programs and the industries they serve.

Visit our website (https://technicianpathways.fsu.edu/) to follow our research activities, publications, presentations, and other project materials.

(Submitted by Curtis S. Tenney, FSU, cst17@my.fsu.edu, Faye Jones, FSU, faye.jones@cci.fsu.edu, and Marcia A. Mardis, FSU, mmardis@fsu.edu. This work is supported in part by NSF grant number 1700581)