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UNM Engineering team wins ASEE best paper for work on first-year engineering course
July 17, 2025 - Carly Bowling
A team from The University of New Mexico School of Engineering, which developed and piloted an integrative first-year engineering course last year, won the award for Best Paper in the First-Year Programs Division at the American Society for Engineering Education annual conference in Montreal in June.
The paper, titled “An Integrative, Querencia-Informed Approach to First-Year Engineering,” explored how the first-year course piloted last fall supported identity formation, persistence intentions, self-efficacy and consequentiality. Course development was guided by the centering of student background and place. The two guiding frameworks are known as funds of knowledge, which integrates a student’s cultural background and everyday experiences, and Querencia, a place-based learning approach.
Vanessa Svihla, a professor in the Organization, Information and Learning Sciences Program and in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, is an expert in engineering education and course design. As a member of the team that designed the first-year engineering experience, she brought valuable insights to course design.
“This course is specially tailored for UNM. At UNM SoE, we serve diverse students, many of whom are the first in their families to attend college. Compared to most research universities, many of our students are interested in staying in New Mexico,” Svihla said. “One thing this course does well is it helps students understand the roles that engineers, computer scientists, and construction managers can play in solving problems here in New Mexico.”
Yadeeh Sawyer, first and second-year experience manager in the Engineering Student Success Center, presented the paper at the ASEE conference and serves on the first-year experience course design team.
“In our real-world jobs, we work on teams of people with different needs and we don’t always stay directly in what we were trained to do. There is often an inherent need for teamwork. We want to give students a solid foundation in working in these cross-disciplinary environments, but it also provides an opportunity to establish those student connections with the School of Engineering early,” Sawyer said.
The pilot-year team also included Ruben Lopez-Para, a former UNM postdoctoral fellow; Christina Salas, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; Madalyn Wilson-Fetrow, a graduate student in the Organization, Information and Learning Sciences Program; and Carl Willis, professor of practice in the Department of Nuclear Engineering.
The pilot course required students to complete individual assignments about their future profession, as well as two longer collaborative projects focused on identifying a problem and designing a solution relevant to New Mexico. The two collaborative projects were themed around water resiliency and decarbonization. First-year engineering courses often include fake design projects that can make it challenging for students to connect engineering to their own lives and communities, according to Svihla.
“By supporting our students to use their knowledge of problems in their own communities, we found that first-year students can frame and propose realistic solutions to the complex problems that New Mexicans face, such as post-wildfire flooding and access to potable water in rural communities,” she said.
The course will begin its second year this fall, this time offered in two sections, and will eventually be open to all incoming School of Engineering students.