Everyday Engineers: Supporting Youth's Critical Engagement with Engineering Across Settings

Abstract

Recent policy documents position engineering as a way to broaden participation for students in STEM fields, noting that engineering gives students the opportunity to deepen their science knowledge by engaging them in problem-solving practices around locally-relevant issues (NRC, 2012; Lead States, 2013). However, a recent literature review of engineering education journals found that less than 1% of reviewed articles focused on equity and broadening participation (Hynes et al., 2017), so there are few frameworks to build on when designing for culturally-responsive engineering instruction. This is compounded by the fact that less than 10% of youth participate in formal engineering learning in K-12 settings (NAP, 2009), particularly at early ages when youth are beginning to cultivate STEM-linked identities that guide their learning trajectories (Bairaktarova, Evangelou, Bagiati & Brophy, 2011; Cunningham & Lachapelle, 2014). The inclusion of engineering as part of the Next Generation Science Standards opens the opportunity for more students to engage with engineering learning in the classroom and invites research and design work that guide equitable approaches to engineering learning that build on students’ everyday knowledge, interests, and experiences. In this dissertation, I described various disconnects between how engineering is conceptualized and taught in K-12 settings and how youth engage with engineering in their everyday lives. In Chapter 2, I identified gaps in research on engineering learning, particularly in relation to constructing equitable engineering learning environments that build on youth’s everyday interests and expertise. In addition, I provided examples from the history of engineering to argue that everyday and tacit knowledge, and technical expertise are and have always been central to engineering problem solving, and can provide examples for how to broaden participation in engineering for minoritized youth. In Chapter 3, I used students’ conceptions of engineering to construct a broad and inclusive definition of the discipline; and found youth’s descriptions closely aligned with recent policy documents that defined engineering as “a systematic and often iterative approach to designing objects, processes and systems to meet human needs and wants” (NRC, 2012, p. 202). Through surveys, self-documentation, and interviews, I also found that youth in this study strongly identified as engineers and engaged in engineering-related activities and practices across the contexts of their lives. In Chapter 4, I argued that distributed and synthetic models of engineering instruction were more likely to produce youth learning outcomes of positive engineering-linked identity and interest, and promote student agency in science knowledge construction. I provided examples of how the practices of modeling, observation, and reflection enabled youth to synthesize distributed knowledge from across settings to support classroom science learning goals in ways that were personally-relevant for students. Lastly, in Chapter five I asked the question: How can we design learning environments to help students critically understand the intrinsic and systemic sociotechnical relationship between people, communities, and the built environment? I propose the term critical sociotechnical literacy to describe the multiple realities of engineering solutions in real-world contexts, which include the power of the designed world and its designers to shape individual and community actions and agency.