LOOKING BEYOND FIDDLERS GREEN COLLEGE: SOCIAL JUSTICE IN WORKFORCE ENGINEERING EDUCATION PATHWAYS

Too often, research into postsecondary workforce and engineering education focuses solely on curricula and ignores student matriculation to high-skill high-wage careers. The purpose of this study is to investigate this subject through dual ethnographies in Project-Based Learning (PBL) Career and Technical Education (CTE) workforce pathways in Silicon Valley. This study looks to better explain functioning pathways. The authors take inspiration from three publications: past research found that seven PBL essentials form good learning outcomes [1]; a measurable outcome of PBL is higher attendance [2]; to which Applied STEM CTE (AS-CTE) [3] framed attendance as a predictor metric of the efficacy of a workforce pathway. We ask which metrics help explain successful workforce CTE pathways. Our ethnography uncovers two distinct postsecondary PBL pathways and explores a new predictive metric of social mobility, which helps to reveal the pathways’ struggle to support marginalized students’ mobility into the high-skill high-wage building workforce. Despite these challenges, a Labor- Union-administered apprenticeship pathway showed promise in aiding social mobility. The authors uncovered early evidence that social mobility may be added as a metric to a predictive ontology framework of pathway success.