Research Experience for Teachers in Manufacturing for Competitiveness in the United States

Research experiences for teachers are one way to interject engineering content into existing science and mathematics programs across the K-12 curriculum. The National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experience for Teachers (RET) program is one initiative that offers funding to organize and implement interactions between university faculty and K-12 teachers. Tennessee Technological University (TTU) presently has an RET site program called Research Experience for Teachers in Manufacturing for Competitiveness in the United States (RETainUS). The TTU program endeavors to immerse teachers from local high schools in research activities, mentored by TTU engineering faculty. The faculty mentors represent an interdisciplinary group representing electrical, mechanical and chemical engineering. TTU's Department of Chemical Engineering has four faculty participants working with teachers to develop a broad spectrum of applications for classroom and laboratory use. Through the training or retraining of teachers RET is one way to reach large numbers of students. A brief overview of the RETainUS program will be given along with descriptions of teacher research, course/laboratory materials developed and outcomes realized after implementation.