Thanks for watching our video and for your questions Tami! We work with classroom teachers throughout the year to co-develop our unit, and implement it. We started with a weeklong professional development program session using the I-Engineering materials to support teachers in deepening their knowledge and practice of engineering design and disciplinary core ideas of energy transformations, sources, and systems as a part of engaging in engineering for sustainable communities. We also provided in-classroom support as they used the I-Engineering curriculum and materials with their students. We help provide them with the lights, copper tape and energy sources for the the engineering challenges, and the students transform other materials readily available in their classrooms to engineer for sustainable communities. We will make the whole curriculum readily available in later stages of our project, but some resources are available now on our website: engineeriam.org. 

In the video, I really liked how identity was framed as not only becoming more knowledgeable and capable in practices, but also defined to include learner agency and recognition. I wonder if you can say more about recognition part. Is this self or peer recognition or teacher's recognition of students? The story about the shift in the teacher is so powerful.  Can you also share the roles of graduate students and/or other community members were involved in this work as part of the learning community? 

Hi Sherry, 

Thanks for your comments! We see recognition as key to students' positive identity work in engineering. Teacher recognition is essential and we work recognition prompts deliberately into the curriculum. Also, the nature of the i-engineering curriculum is such that the students are positioned quite immediately as insiders to their community with expert knowledge and they engage in community ethnography to collaboratively identify areas of concern that they can design solutions for, informed by community feedback. This approach necessitates peer and self-recognition in the process. What the students ended up innovating also continued to solidify peer and self recognition --for example the Occupied innovation is a constant visual symbol of the creators' creativity and practicality as community engineers. As for researchers on the team apart from the PIs, 3 grad students at MSU and 1 postdoc at UNCG participated with the PIs as co-teachers and facilitators during the classroom IENG instruction period. We are all committed to an equity-oriented, anti-deficit lens, so we model recognition of the students' ideas and contributions whenever we can. In addition, during the feedback sessions, we solicited help engineer friends in the community to give feedback to the students on their design, which we think further supports students' developing identity work in engineering --they get real feedback from practicing engineers. 

Thanks, Kate! We are learning so much with youth in this project. I checked out your video, and am really impressed by your team's argumentation toolkit. What a great way to support teachers! 

Thanks for checking it out, Tami! 

Thanks for stopping by, Christopher. We are excited by how many of the students are starting to explore more deeply what engineering entails and what engineers do, and to see themselves as being capable of engaging in engineering practices. One student talked about how frustrated he was when figuring out trade-offs, he said "I was MAD all the time, but I was happy." As researchers and teachers, we too have a lot to learn. 

Hi Dale: Thank you for your comment. The insights of my past projects have most definitely informed the work we have been doing with teachers and students in this project. We piloted our materials with teachers in 9 classrooms this semester (full pilot in 6 of them), and we are just beginning to really dig into the data. However, our preliminary analysis offers some powerful examples of teachers sharing epistemic authority with students in ways that opened not only opportunities for student learning, but also opportunities for students to develop their science agency. An example tied to the bathroom lights story in the video is the teacher describing that she struggled with figuring out how to help students go from their 2-d sketches of their ideas (where she could tell if the circuits would sketched out properly) to the 3-d constructions (where she struggled, alongside the students). She said that she realized that she could say "I don't get this. Mateo [student] could you look at this. Sometimes you can find student experts. . . It wasn’t like it's a disaster that I could not always do it. I could say who really gets this. Could you look at this for me and tell me what you think? This was a situation where I had to step back because some of them were better than me. And that’s fine. It worked."

Hi Angela,

I love when the teachers becomes comfortable learning with their students, and that seems to be an essential component of the I-Engineering method.  We know how hard it can be to change a developed practice and start something new, particularly when you've become comfortable as many teachers have in lecture and other methods of learning.  Anyhow, I wonder which methods of support for teachers implementing I-Engineering have yielded the greatest results, particularly for those who may not feel naturally technically inclined.

 

Thanks in advance for any insights!

Hi Michael: Thank you for your comments. We are still combing through our data to figure some of these things out as our goal is to be able to support teachers (and students) with the tools and materials rather than an intensive presence in their classroom. However, I will point out a few that we do believe were impactful, in part, because the teachers mentioned them as very helpful.

  Our I-Eng framework is grounded in engineering for sustainable communities approach (see NRC, 2010), and a large part of that approach is to incorporate participatory approaches to allow for multiple perspectives/shared ownership across the design process. We do think that this helped to reduce the risk of “not knowing” for many of our participating teachers. No one expected them (or us, as project leaders) to know what the community needed exactly, or how they would  input into the design process. We built in many structures within the curriculum to support/open up the dialog between the teacher/students and the community, and which also allowed for teachers and students to play different kinds of expert roles. Being able to legitimately say “I dont know” (because you are not supposed to know necessarily) really helped to shift the authority in the classroom space.   We sought to design our materials as educative (Davis et al) but we added new dimensions to that in terms of what it means to learn about students cultural repertoires of practice and how that informs learning in STEM. For example, we used an artifact called “postcards” created by youth (co-developers in our pre-pilot) where they literally made postcards that described their engineering design (what the design is, problem it solves, how it works (technical dimensions), how it addresses community concerns (social dimensions), and what they valued about the process and themselves. These postcards became key tools that teachers would be use to make sense of how to connect engineering with community, and shared designs that they could point to in their work with the students in their classroom as they sought to help them take next steps in their own designs (how did Amiah make the light up umbrella? What input did she need?). We have other tools built into the materials that provided these sorts of structures. (Students then made their own postcards at the end of the design challenge — which, by the way, took between 4 and 6 weeks depending on which classroom in our pilot). 
  We also sought to reduce the risk that teachers might feel during implementing this unit by being in the classroom with them. However, our role in the classrooms was as a member of a distributed network of experts - teachers, students, community members and us. Next year will be interesting because we will have a less intensive role in the classrooms as we seek to engage in a larger classroom studies on our tools and materials.    (We also held a weeklong teacher PD in summer where we engaged the materials together, and periodic debriefs during the implementation phase). 

Thank you Angela for your thoughtful response.  One thing that I see in there that is a big one I think, is the narrative that allows people to not know, without shame.  So powerful!

Thanks!

I totally agree! I also like the healthy representation of girls in the video. I liked the sense of wonder they espoused at the work they were doing. I hope they continue to pursue engineering. 

Thanks for your comment, Rachel. We hope the students have even more opportunities to feel welcomed to do science and engineering and to be recognized for all of the expertise they bring to it. One student describe the barriers to participating in STEM identity work when she said, "I guess that they would see that this wasn’t made by professors at an institute or something, but it was made by you know a middle school girl at that!” Through her engineering work and calling out stereotypes, she resisted who gets to engineer.