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-back 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.
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This content will become publicly available on June 1, 2024
The influence of notebooks on elementary teachers engaging in engineering practices.
This fundamental research in pre-college education engineering study investigates the ways in which elementary teachers learn about engineering by engaging in the epistemic practices of engineers. Teaching engineering explicitly in elementary settings is a paradigm shift, as most K-6 teachers are not taught about engineering in their preparation programs and did not do classroom engineering as students. However, current STEM education reforms require these teachers to teach engineering in science settings and it will require concerted efforts between professional development providers and educational researchers to better help these teachers learn about and teach engineering to their students.
Our study context consisted of 18 2nd and 4th grade teachers participating in one of two two-day workshops. The first day focused on what engineering is, what the epistemic practices of engineering are, and how to manage classroom engineering projects. The second day focused on how to teach a specific engineering unit for their grade level. Taking a sociomaterial view of learning, we asked the following research questions:
1. How do the engineering notebooks scaffold the teachers activities and discourse?
2. How and to what extent does the notebook support their engagement in engineering practices?
Our analysis triangulated between three data sources during a two-hour time period where teachers designed, tested, and improved enclosures intended to minimize cost and mass loss of an ice cube in a heat chamber (“Perspiring Penguins” (Schnittka, 2010)). We focused on teacher talk/action collected from video/audio recordings trained on four small groups (10 total teachers). We also collected engineering notebooks they used during this activity. After initial analyses, we followed up with select teachers with targeted interview questions to focus on clarification of questions that arose.
Our findings suggest that the teachers use the notebooks in ways that are significantly different from the ways engineers do; however, they are a useful pedagogical tool that supported them in attending to and discussing activities that were necessary to engage in engineering practices and design/re-design their technology. Additionally, our paper will describe specific examples where teachers had rich discussions that were not represented in the notebooks but there were references made in the notebooks that were not explicitly discussed. Implications for the importance of well-designed notebooks and the benefits of ethnographic methods for researching teacher learning will be discussed.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1930777
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10442431
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings ASEE annual conference
- ISSN:
- 0190-1052
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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