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1. Supporting Upper Elementary Students’ Engineering Practices in an Integrated Science and Engineering Unit.

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--35258  

   Lilly, S. ; McAlister, A. ; Fick, S. ; Chiu, J. L. ; McElhaney, K. ( June 2020 , Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line.)

   To support teachers in providing all students with opportunities to engage in engineering learning activities, research must examine the ways that elementary teachers support how diverse learners engage with engineering ideas and practices. This study focuses on two teachers' verbal supports in classroom discussions across two class sections of a four-week, NGSS-aligned unit that challenged students to redesign their school to reduce water runoff. We examine the research question: How and to what extent do upper-elementary teachers verbally support students' engagement with engineering practices across diverse classroom contexts in an NGSS-aligned integrated science unit? Classroom audio data was collected daily and coded to analyze support through different purposes of teacher talk. Results reveal the purpose of teachers’ talk often varied between the class sections depending on the instructional activity and indicate that teachers utilized a variety of supports toward students' engagement in different engineering practices. In one class, with a large percentage of students with individualized educational plans, teachers provided more epistemic talk about the engineering practices to contextualize the particular activities. For the other class, with a large percentage of students in advanced mathematics, teachers provided more opportunities for students to engage in discussion and support for students tomore »do engineering. This difference in supports may decrease the opportunities for some students to rigorously engage in engineering ideas and practices. This study can inform future research on the kinds of educative supports needed to guide teaching of integrated engineering activities for diverse students.« less
2. Transformations in Elementary Teachers' Pedagogical Reasoning: Studying Teacher Learning in an Online Graduate Program in Engineering Education

   Watkins, Jessica ; Portsmore, Merredith ; Swanson, Rebecca ( January 2019 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   This research paper describes a study of elementary teacher learning in an online graduate program in engineering education for in-service teachers. While the existing research on teachers in engineering focuses on their disciplinary understandings and beliefs (Hsu, Cardella, & Purzer, 2011; Martin, et al., 2015; Nadelson, et al., 2015; Van Haneghan, et al., 2015), there is increasing attention to teachers' pedagogy in engineering (Capobianco, Delisi, & Radloff, 2018). In our work, we study teachers' pedagogical sense-making and reflection, which, we argue, is critical for teaching engineering design. This study takes place in [blinded] program, in which teachers take four graduate courses over fifteen months. The program was designed to help teachers not only learn engineering content, but also shift their thinking and practice to be more responsive to their students. Two courses focus on pedagogy, including what it means to learn engineering and instructional approaches to support this learning. These courses consist of four main elements, in which teachers: 1) Read data-rich engineering education articles to reflect on learning engineering; 2) Participate in online video clubs, looking at classroom videos of students’ engineering and commenting on what they notice; 3) Conduct interviews with learners about the mechanism of a pull-backmore »car; and 4) Plan and teach engineering lessons, collecting and analyzing video from their classrooms. In the context of this program, we ask: what stances do teachers take toward learning and teaching engineering design? What shifts do we observe in their stances? We interviewed teachers at the start of the program and after each course. In addition to reflecting on their learning and teaching, teachers watched videos of students’ engineering and discussed what they saw as relevant for teaching engineering. We informally compared summaries from previous interviews to get a sense of changes in how participants talked about engineering, how they approached teaching engineering, and what they noticed in classroom videos. Through this process, we identified one teacher to focus on for this paper: Alma is a veteran 3rd-5th grade science teacher in a rural, racially-diverse public school in the southeastern region of the US. We then developed content logs of Alma's interviews and identified emergent themes. To refine these themes, we looked for confirming and disconfirming evidence in the interviews and in her coursework in the program. We coded each interview for these themes and developed analytic memos, highlighting where we saw variability and stability in her stances and comparing across interviews to describe shifts in Alma's reasoning. It was at this stage that we narrowed our focus to her stances toward the engineering design process (EDP). In this paper, we describe and illustrate shifts we observed in Alma's reasoning, arguing that she exhibited dramatic shifts in her stances toward teaching and learning the EDP. At the start of the program, she was stable in treating the EDP as a series of linear steps that students and engineers progress through. After engaging and reflecting on her own engineering in the first course, she started to express a more fluid stance when talking more abstractly about the EDP but continued to take it up as a linear process in her classroom teaching. By the end of the program, Alma exhibited a growing stability across contexts in her stance toward the EDP as a fluid set of overlapping practices that students and engineers could engage in.« less
3. How a Research-Practice Partnership Refined its Strategy for Integrating CS/CT into K-5 Curricula: An Experience Report

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3478431.3499281  

   Adrion, W. Richards ; Bevan, Katie ; Foster, Paul ; Matuszczak, Denise ; Miller, Rachel ; Rita, Laura ; Sullivan, Florence R. ; Veeragoudar, Sneha ; Wohlers, Scott ; Zeitz, Melissa ( March 2022 , SIGCSE ’22)

   Massachusetts defined K-12 Digital Literacy/Computer Science (DLCS) standards in 2016 and developed a 5-12 teacher licensure process, expecting K-4 teachers to be capable of teaching to the standards under their elementary license. An NSF CSforAll planning grant led to the establishment of an NSF 4-year ResearchPractice Partnership (RPP) of district and school administrators, teachers, university researchers, and external evaluators in 2018. The RPP focused on the 33 K-5 serving schools to engage all students in integrated CS/CT teaching and learning and to create a cadre of skilled and confident elementary classroom teachers ready to support their students in learning CS/CT concepts and practices. The pandemic exacerbated barriers and inequities across the district, which serves over 25,000 diverse students (9.7% white/nonHispanic, 83.7% high needs). Having observed a lack of awareness and expertise among many K-5 teachers for implementing CS/CT content and practices and seeing barriers to equitable CS/CT teaching and learning, the RPP designed an iterative, teacher-led, co-design of curriculum supported by equity-focused and embedded professional learning. This experience report describes how we refined our strategies for curriculum development and diffusion, professional learning, and importantly, our commitment to addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion beyond just reaching all students. The RPP broadenedmore »its focus on understanding race and equity to empower students to understand how technology affects their identities and to equip them to critically participate in the creation and use of technology« less
4. Using Engineering Design Tasks to Create Indigenous Cultural and Community Connections with the Classroom for Elementary and Middle School Students

   Bowman, F. ; Klemetsrud, B. ; Ozturk, E. ; Robinson, J. ( August 2022 , 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Oftentimes engineering design tasks are thought of as acultural and devoid of community inclusion and values. However, engineering design is inherently a cultural endeavor. Problems needing engineering solutions or design thinking are situated in a specific community and need community solutions. This work in progress paper describes initial efforts from a project to help elementary and middle school teachers create culturally relevant engineering design tasks for implementation in their classrooms. To integrate best practices for culturally relevant pedagogy, the engineering design framework developed by UTeach Engineering was adapted to specifically address community needs and cultural values. Changes to the framework also include culturally relevant instructional strategies for classroom implementation. To situate the engineering design steps within a culturally relevant framework questions involving communities and students’ cultural needs, values, and expectations were posed in each stage of the design process. A water filtration engineering design task was situated in the cultural concept of “Mni Wiconi” (Water is life in the Dakota language). This was taught in a summer professional development workshop for a cohort of elementary and middle school teachers, in rural North Dakota, with school districts comprised of large Native American student populations. Teachers adapted this design task for theirmore »individual classrooms and content areas (science, math, social studies, ELA) and implemented it in their classrooms in the fall of 2021. Additional support for teachers was provided with fall workshop days aimed at helping them with the facilitation of a culturally relevant engineering task. To integrate culturally relevant teaching and good engineering design tasks, the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction’s Native American Essential Understandings Teachings of our Elder’s website was used. This allowed teachers and students to have firsthand knowledge of how various science and engineering concepts are framed within the indigenous community. Professional development focused on how to situate culturally responsive teaching in engineering design. For example, in one of the school districts the water filtration task was related to increased pollution of a nearby lake which holds significant importance for the local Tribal Nation. In addition to being able to visibly witness the demand for cleaner water, the book “We are Water Protectors” written by Carole Lindstrom, was used to provide cultural grounding for the Identify and Describe stages of the engineering design framework. Case studies of how teachers incorporated the water filtration design task into their lesson plans are presented along with their suggestions on how to improve classroom implementation. Future work in the program includes teachers and their students developing engineering design tasks situated in their own communities and cultures.« less
5. Equity-based CS Case Study: An Approach to Exploring White Teachers’ Conceptions of Race and Racism in a Professional Development Setting

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3487332  

   Veeragoudar, Sneha ; Sullivan, Florence R. ( September 2022 , ACM Transactions on Computing Education)

   Here, we present the results of a study of in-service teachers’ responses to equity-based case study vignettes focused on racialized classroom incidents. This study was conducted in the context of an ongoing research practice partnership aimed at integrating computer science concepts in elementary grades. Our work took place in a public school district that enrolls primarily students of color, while largely employing White teachers and administrators. Using a racial literacy framework [Guinier 2004 ], we conceptualized a continuum and developed codes to analyze teachers’ responses from racially liberal to racially literate. Our results describe a range of positions across the continuum, including those consistent with the racial liberalism viewpoint that expresses individualistic views of meritocracy and colorblindness that sometimes supports a deficit view of students, those that reside in the middle who validate equity work through minimal acknowledgment yet find ways to resist further engagement with race or equity, and those who express views consistent with racial literacy practices including student-centered perspectives, asset-orientations, and the willingness to engage race directly. Further, our results indicate that teachers may express contradictory views or views across the continuum. These findings point to the developmental nature of racial literacy and the difficulty of unlearningmore »racist mindsets. We discuss the efficacy of our case study design: anonymized, locally derived vignettes, and our case study learning activity design: written reflections, small group dialogues, and whole group share-outs in supporting teacher reflection and learning. Finally, we demonstrate the special leadership role of teachers who are moving toward racial literacy.« less