UE president: ‘We’re all-in on our community’ with Toyota partnership
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The president of the University of Evansville says the recently announced partnership with Toyota Indiana to advance STEM education in southwest Indiana follows a 15-month design process.
The university was named a coordinating partner for the automaker’s Driving Possibilities initiative, and received a $2 million grant from the Toyota USA Foundation.
The initiative is benefiting K-12 students at schools in the North Gibson School Corp. and the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp., and UE President Christopher Pietruszkiewicz said the goal is to support both students and teachers.
Pietruszkiewicz told Inside INdiana Business that they wanted to have the right community partners in place to make a difference in early childhood education.
“You can’t start early enough,” he said. “I know I’m a university president, and we talk about higher education a lot, but the idea is that it doesn’t start when you get to high school; it starts before kindergarten. And if we can help form the minds of people before they even get to school, the better chance we have as a country, and the better chance we have as a state.”
The initiative is being led by UE’s Center for Innovation and Change and the School of Education.
The university said the design process has already led to several improvements at the two school districts, the university said, including a new pre-K learning center, STEM-based playground at Princeton Community Primary School, and experiential learning opportunities for K-12 students.
However, Pietruszkiewicz noted that the Toyota grant will have a key focus on preparing educators to teach STEM concepts.
“Part of this will create a lab at the University of Evansville that allows teachers from those schools to be able to come collaborate together, figure out even better how to teach STEM education, and have the tools to be able to teach engineering and robotics,” he said. “The idea of being able to do that in a central location and the ability to be able to collaborate together, I think, is the really big plus. It’s pretty neat to be able to do something yourself; it’s even better when you get to collaborate with a whole bunch of people, because the benefits magnify themselves.”
That lab will be a a new Indiana Next Generation Manufacturing Competitiveness, or IN-MaC, Design and Innovation Training Studio located within UE’s School of Education. The studio will serve as a hub for training teachers on robotics, coding, engineering, and science learning modules.
The local schools involved in the initiative are Princeton Community High School, Princeton Community Middle School, Princeton Community Intermediary School, and Princeton Community Preschool in Gibson County, as well as Lodge Community School in Evansville.
Pietruszkiewicz said the school districts have been involved in the planning process from the very beginning.
“This wasn’t just Evansville and Toyota sitting around a table saying, ‘What can we do for the community?’ It was Evansville and Toyota and four schools in Princeton, one in Evansville, sitting around the table and saying, ‘What can we do together for the benefit of Evansville and the benefit of Princeton?’ So it’s the idea of not doing it for the community; it’s doing it with the community.”
As part of the initiative, the university hired alumni Susan Nyberg and Adison Young to serve as program manager and STEM coordinator, respectively.
Pietruszkiewicz the long-term goal of the initiative is to increase STEM education for all of southwest Indiana and help prepare students as early as possible for future careers whether they decide to pursue higher education or not.
He added that the partners aim to scale the program up to more schools and become a model for the state.
“I know Toyota is doing this in other states,” he said. “This is the second one for them. They started in Texas, where their foundation is in a partnership in Dallas. It has worked extraordinarily well, but this is the first time Toyota’s been working directly with a coordinating partner that’s a university to be able to help advance STEM within elementary education. And what better partner to have than somebody who knows how to do it?”