Integrating literacy and engineering instruction for young learners

According to recently published national standards, elementary students should engage in engineering design activities. This article outlines ways that teachers can use literacy instruction to support young students’ engineering design activity, such as by selecting texts in which characters face problems that can be solved through engineering, providing students with opportunities to practice comprehension strategies while reading those texts, and modeling for them how to write a variety of texts that are relevant to engineers’ practices. The authors describe how they integrated this type of literacy instruction into engineering units in third- and fifth-grade classrooms

Middle School Engineering Teachers’ Enactments of Pedagogies Rooted in Funds of Knowledge and Translanguaging

Multilingual students should have opportunities to learn and do engineering in learning environments that foreground and sustain their cultural and linguistic practices. However, little is known about how middle school engineering teachers enact these environments. To address this gap in research and practice, this comparative case study describes the different ways in which two middle school technology and engineering teachers enacted pedagogies rooted in funds of knowledge and translanguaging. The teachers and research team engaged in a professional learning community, which focused on funds of knowledge and language-based pedagogies, for over one year. The teachers enacted pedagogies that incorporated principles of funds of knowledge and translanguaging, reflected on their teaching, and sought to improve their pedagogy in subsequent iterations of teaching. In this context, the research team analyzed the following data sources: (a) transcripts from classroom observations during a minimum of four engineering design challenges per teacher; (b) teacher artifacts (e.g., lesson plans, curriculum materials); and (c) monthly reflection sessions and interviews with each teacher. Thematic analyses of these data were used to answer the following research question: How did the teachers enact funds of knowledge and translanguaging pedagogies? Analyses indicated similarities and differences in how the teachers enacted funds of knowledge and translanguaging pedagogies. Similarities included (a) providing students with bilingual materials; (b) grounding engineering design challenges in the context of students’ communities; and (c) positioning parents as core intellectual resources. While the two teachers enacted pedagogies in similar ways, they also demonstrated differences. Alex, a bilingual teacher who had lived in Peru, enacted funds of knowledge pedagogies through sharing narratives and explaining how they mapped onto the engineering design challenges. He also frequently spoke to students in Spanish. Andrew, a white monolingual teacher who had lived and taught in his community for decades, enacted funds of knowledge pedagogies through experiential and place-based learning, and through incorporating popular culture. Despite his efforts to sustain bilingualism through providing bilingual curriculum materials, English remained the primary medium of instruction within his class, consistent with his school’s de facto English-only policy. This study indicates that funds of knowledge and translanguaging pedagogies may be fostered through community-oriented engineering design challenges and through school-level policies and practices that explicitly encourage multilingualism

A Social Semiotic Analysis of Instructional Images across Academic Disciplines

Framed in theories of social semiotics, this descriptive multiple case study examined the images used by six middle-school teachers during one school year as they each taught two different subject areas: earth science, language arts, mathematics, and/or social studies. Using Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar to analyze these images, this study identified discipline-specific patterns in how 1,132 images realized assumptions in regards to the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions of communication. A content analysis suggested discipline-specific differences in the presumed social distance between the content of the images and the students, as well as discipline-specific differences in assumptions about the subjectivity of knowledge. Instructional implications are suggested, such as encouraging students to critique the assumptions in images and selecting a wider array of image types in each discipline

One adolescent\u27s construction of native identity in school: Speaking with dance and not in words and writing

This case study describes how one eighth-grade student, Jon, asserted Native identities in texts as he attended a middle school in the western United States. Jon--a self-described Native American, Navajo, and Paiute with verified Native ancestry--sought to share what he called his Native culture with others in his school wherein he was the only Native American, despite his perception that schools have historically suppressed this culture. To study how the texts that Jon designed in school may have afforded and constrained the expression of Native identities, the authors collected three types of data over the course of eight months: (a) interviews from Jon and his teachers; (b) fieldnotes from classroom observations; and (c) texts that Jon designed in school. Grounded in theories of social semiotics and multimodality, the findings from this study suggest that different forms of representation afforded and constrained the expression of Jon\u27s desired identities in different ways due to their different physical properties, due to their historical and immediate uses in context, and due to the extent to which they fulfilled different metafunctions of communication. Recognizing the tensions and ironies associated with using some forms of representation, Jon sought to combine and use multiple representations to construct desired identities and to negate undesired ones

Transnational Latinx Youths’ Workplace Funds of Knowledge and Implications for Assets-Based, Equity-Oriented Engineering Education

Due to economic inequality in society, millions of Latinx high school youth work after-school jobs and summer jobs in order to provide additional income for their families. The purpose of this qualitative study, conducted with transnational Latinx youth, was to identify the engineering-related skills and bodies of knowledge they developed and applied while in different workplaces. This study is framed in complementary theories of funds of knowledge, Vygotskian theories of mediated action, and theories of resistant capital. Specifically, this study is based in the premise that youth can develop engineering-related funds of knowledge through tool-mediated, goal-directed activities jointly conducted with family members and others, and that workplaces can be important sites for the development of funds of knowledge. Workplace activities are situated within sociohistorical contexts in which Latinx workers are often exploited and thus mobilize forms of resistance. A multiple case study was conducted with 20 transnational Latinx youth who currently or previously worked one or more jobs to supplement family income. Data sources included workplace observations, occupational interviews, and semi-structured interviews. We first divided the data by category of business ownership (family-owned businesses versus corporate-owned businesses) to explore whether different types of workplaces, characterized by different hierarchical relations, fostered different types of skills and bodies of knowledge. Constant comparative analytic methods were used to describe the engineering-related bodies of knowledge and skills, including critical resistant skills, that the youths applied in the context of workplace activities. Across different occupations, all youth developed and applied knowledge and skills related to industrial and operations engineering, including the iterative development of processes designed to maximize efficiency and to promote health and safety. While applying funds of knowledge toward their employers’ goals, they also applied these funds of knowledge to make counter-spaces that were more humane, and they expanded technical processes to include a deep consideration of the emotions and well-being of people and animals. Ultimately, the youth mobilized and hoped to mobilize these funds of knowledge and forms of resistance toward more humane workplaces, better living conditions in their homes and communities, and more economically secure futures for themselves and their families. This study does not romanticize exploitative economic conditions experienced by suggesting that Latinx youths’ workplace experiences are positive, but it offers better understandings of the wide range of complex and rich engineering-related funds of knowledge developed in the context of different workplace activities. Educators who understand and recognize these funds of knowledge as assets may be able to design more equitable learning environments that position working youth as experts and core contributors. Educational implications include recognizing youths’ workplace experiences as epistemological resources, and critiquing and transforming systems through expanded visions of engineering. These visions of engineering can include but extend beyond the design of physical technologies, to encompass the design of interacting processes, technologies, and systems. Ultimately this type of education could repurpose workplace-derived funds of knowledge (from serving employers or corporations) toward more equitable futures (serving youths’ personal trajectories and communities)

Reading and Engineering: Elementary Students’ Co-Application of Comprehension Strategies and Engineering Design Processes

For decades, researchers have asserted that K–12 teachers should embed reading comprehension instruction within each academic discipline, including ‘‘technical subjects’’ such as engineering. Recently, this assertion has become a source of controversy among researchers and practitioners who believe that time spent on teaching reading comprehension strategies may detract from time spent on more authentic activities such as engineering design. The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate whether and how elementary students’ applications of comprehension strategies overlapped with their application of engineering design processes. The authors provided comprehension strategy instruction to 57 third- and fifth-grade students as they read texts describing problems that could be solved through engineering. The authors used constant comparative methods to analyze students’ comments from small-group and whole-class discussions about the texts. A former reading teacher with a PhD in literacy education identified students’ application of reading comprehension strategies, while a former engineer with a PhD in engineering education identified their application of engineering design processes. The analysis indicated that 80.5% of comments that were coded as ‘‘comprehension strategy’’ were also coded as ‘‘engineering design process.’’ Particular comprehension strategies tended to co-occur with particular engineering design processes. This study challenges the assumption that time spent in applying comprehension strategies detracts from time spent in learning engineering design. Elementary students’ application of comprehension strategies occurred in conjunction with their application of engineering design processes, suggesting that comprehension strategy instruction and engineering design instruction can be conceptualized as complementary rather than competing

Examining the Literacy Practices of Engineers to Develop a Model of Disciplinary Literacy Instruction for K-12 Engineering (Work in Progress)

Despite efforts to diversify the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce, engineering remains a White, male-dominated profession. Often, women and underrepresented students do not identify with STEM careers and many opt out of STEM pathways prior to entering high school or college. In order to broaden participation in engineering, new methods of engaging and retaining those who are traditionally underrepresented in engineering are needed. This work is based on a promising approach for encouraging and supporting diverse participation in engineering: disciplinary literacy instruction (DLI). Generally, teachers use DLI to provide K-12 students with a framework for interpreting, evaluating, and generating discipline-specific texts. This instruction provides students with an understanding of how experts in the discipline read, engage, and generate texts used to solve problems or communicate information. While models of disciplinary literacy have been developed and disseminated in several humanities and science fields, there is a lack of empirical and theoretical research that examines the use of DLI within the engineering domain. It is thought that DLI can be used to foster diverse student interest in engineering from a young age by removing literacy-based barriers that often discourage underrepresented students from entering and pursuing careers in STEM fields. This work-in-progress paper describes a new study underway to develop and disseminate a model of disciplinary literacy in engineering. During this project, researchers will observe, interview, and collect written artifacts from engineers working across four sub-disciplines of engineering: aerospace/mechanical, biological, civil/environmental, and electrical/computer. Data that will be collected include interview transcripts, observation field notes, engineer logs of literacy practices, and photographs of texts that the engineers read and write. Data will be analyzed using constant comparative analytic (CCA) methods. CCA will be used to generate theoretical codes from the data that will form the basis for a model of disciplinary literacy in engineering. As a primary outcome of this research, the engineering DLI model will promote the use of DLI practices within K-12 engineering instruction in order to assist and encourage diverse, underrepresented students to engage in engineering courses of study and pursue STEM careers. Thus far, the research team has begun collecting and analyzing data from two electrical engineers. This work in progress paper will report on preliminary findings, as well as implications for K-12 classroom instruction. For instance, this study has shed insights on how engineers use texts as part of the process of conducting failure analysis, and the research team has begun to conceptualize how these types of texts might be used with K-12 students to help them conduct failure analyses during design testing. Ultimately, this project will result in a list of grade-appropriate texts, evaluative frameworks, and activities (e.g., failure analysis in testing) that K-12 engineering teachers can use to prepare their diverse students to think, act, read, and write like engineers