Teaching future STEM teachers
Not only does Professor Pamela Lottero-Perdue prepare her education students at TU to teach engineering to children, but she also helps public schools in Maryland offer engineering by customizing curricula.
With increasing emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in PreK-12 education, teachers face the sometimes intimidating—even scary, for some—task of integrating these areas into their lessons.
Enter Towson University Professor Pamela Lottero-Perdue who specializes in engineering education, an aspect of STEM that has been largely overshadowed by mathematics and science.
Not only does Lottero-Perdue prepare her education students at TU to teach engineering to children, but she also helps public schools in Maryland offer engineering by customizing curricula and conducting professional development for in-service teachers. Lottero-Perdue is specially qualified to bridge the worlds of engineering and education.
She worked both as a mechanical and process engineer in an industrial setting and as a high school physics and pre-engineering teacher before earning her Ph.D. in science education curriculum and instruction.
“ Now there’s a batch of teachers in our state who went from thinking engineering wasn’t their thing to being passionate about sharing concepts in their classrooms. ”
Lottero-Perdue is a 2014 recipient of the Northeastern Maryland Technology Council Innovator Award and has won multiple “Best Paper” awards from the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) for her research on elementary teachers’ perspectives on teaching engineering and student and teacher responses to design failure. She is immediate past chair of the Pre-College Engineering Education Division of the ASEE.