A group of K–12 teachers from across the Navajo Nation spent part of their summer rethinking how engineering is taught by turning familiar community challenges into classroom design problems.
Teachers as co-designers, not just implementers
The Diné Engineering Education Pathways (DEEP) Fellowship, co-hosted by the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering and the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation at Arizona State University (ASU), brought teachers together to develop engineering curriculum that is grounded in local culture and lived experience.
Rather than delivering off-the-shelf lessons, the programme positioned teachers as partners in curriculum development. Activities used in the fellowship asked teachers to role-play as learners, confronting practical problems such as improving a small walking robot’s grip on an icy slope — modelled by a cookie sheet covered in ice — to mirror winter conditions encountered in parts of the Navajo Nation.
“I’m an expert in engineering design. I’m not an expert in teaching in Navajo classrooms,” Shawn Jordan says.
Shawn Jordan, interim director of the School of Integrated Engineering and an associate professor at ASU’s Polytechnic School, and Michelle Jordan, an associate professor in the Mary Lou Fulton College, led the project. They framed the collaboration as a two-way exchange that combines university engineering knowledge with teachers’ contextual expertise.
Practical classroom focus
Fellowship participants worked on lesson ideas that ask learners to solve problems they recognise from daily life. The small-robot snowshoe task is one example of an engineering challenge designed to make abstract design principles tangible and connected to community needs.
Organisers emphasised that the aim was not simply to familiarise teachers with engineering content but to enable them to adapt and shape it so that it resonates with their students’ cultural backgrounds and local conditions. This approach seeks to move beyond the traditional model in which university-created curriculum is handed down for classroom use.
- Local relevance: Challenges mirror real community problems so learners see themselves as problem-solvers.
- Teacher-led design: Educators co-develop lessons, bringing classroom knowledge into the curriculum development process.
- Active learning: Hands-on tasks position teachers in the role of students to better understand learning experiences.
| Partner | Role |
|---|---|
| Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering (ASU) | Co-host; brought engineering expertise and design challenges |
| Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation (ASU) | Co-host; led teacher development and pedagogical support |
| Diné teachers from the Navajo Nation | Co-designers; adapted lessons to reflect culture and context |
Implications for classroom practice
The DEEP model highlights several considerations relevant to policy-makers and school leaders. Placing teachers at the centre of curriculum design can create lessons that are more meaningful to learners, particularly in communities where mainstream curriculum has historically felt remote or irrelevant.
For educators, the fellowship shows the value of experiential, problem-based learning that uses local knowledge as a resource. For systems, it suggests a scalable route to diversify STEM pathways by recognising teachers’ expertise in their own contexts and by enabling two-way collaboration with higher education.
By modelling winter conditions on a cookie sheet and tasking teachers to improve a tiny robot’s traction, organisers created a low-cost, low-risk environment for experimenting with design ideas. Such tangible, locally anchored tasks can help learners understand the engineering design process while reinforcing their cultural identities.
The DEEP Fellowship presents a concrete example of how engineering education can be reimagined to be more inclusive, culturally responsive and practical — an approach that South African educators and policy-makers may find instructive as they seek to broaden access to meaningful STEM learning.
