Transportation Curriculum with Culturally Responsive Teaching: Lessons Learned from Pre-Service Teachers and Future Transportation Workforce

Abstract

With K-12 students from diverse social and cultural backgrounds in the classroom today, it is crucial to develop a more inclusive and socially diverse curriculum, especially in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) topics. Transportation in particular is a topic that can relate to people’s culture and can be a suitable medium to introduce diversity and inclusion in STEM fields. Culturally responsive teaching (CRT) is a technique that can help connect students’ cultures, languages, and life experiences with their learning. Despite the known benefits of CRT, this strategy had not been adequately implemented in transportation education because of the limited awareness and knowledge of educators. This research contributes to the literature by investigating the current state of knowledge, awareness, and resources present in transportation pedagogy and investigates the feasibility of transportation as a suitable topic to incorporate culturally responsive learning strategies through surveys and workshops with pre-service science teachers and the future transportation workforce. Five key elements emerged from the analysis. First, the existing lack of diversity in STEM curriculum started to change to be inclusive. Second, teachers’ awareness and preparation are crucial for creating quality educational materials. Third, curriculum topics that can relate to cultural components in daily living enhance social diversity in transportation education. Therefore, fourth, transportation can be a good curriculum topic and, fifth, barriers including the difficulty of incorporating many cultural components, privacy, and legal issues still exist. The identified gaps and highlighted areas can contribute to the current state of knowledge and practice of CRT in STEM and transportation pedagogy.