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Out-of-school time (OST) offers many opportunities for youth to learn engineering; youth in OST engineering programs engage in engineering practices, increase their disciplinary knowledge, strengthen their identities as engineering learners, and build interest in engineering careers. OST educators contribute to these positive outcomes for youth through a variety of teaching practices. One way that educators influence youths’ learning is through ambitious instruction that elicits and supports youths’ engineering reasoning and engineering identity. This study focuses on ambitious engineering instruction at the level of educators’ moment-to-moment dialogue with small groups of learners. While it is known that schoolteachers’ pedagogical talk moves influence learners, little is known about out-of-school time educators’ talk moves. This study examines the pedagogical talk moves of experienced out-of-school time educators during engineering design activities in OST programs for youth aged 8-12 years. The study identifies the talk moves of OST educators, adds to the understanding of pedagogical talk moves, and considers these talk moves within the framework of Ambitious Engineering Instruction. This study asks: What kinds of pedagogical talk moves do experienced OST educators use when interacting with youth during engineering design activities?     In this study, educators facilitated a series of engineering design challenges for a total of six to twelve hours in afterschool programs (one hour/week) or out-of-school workshops or mini-camps (two to four hours/day across two or three days). All educators taught at least five of six possible design challenges. We selectively sampled and analyzed the video- and audio-recordings of two educators teaching two of the same design challenges. We used the Ambitious Engineering Instruction Framework to classify the teaching talk moves that these educators used in interactions with individual youth and small groups of youth who were participating in these engineering design challenges. We identified ambitious, inclusive, and conservative talk moves across the four samples. We observed educators seeking to understand youths’ design ideas, eliciting youths’ engineering reasoning, and encouraging youths to persist despite frustration with a design failure. These teaching moves have the potential to guide students to engage in productive engineering design practices and to support youths’ identities as capable engineering learners and possible future engineers. This analysis of educators’ teaching talk moves contributes to our understanding of ambitious engineering instruction in out-of-school learning environments. 

Out-of-school time educators have limited professional development opportunities, particularly around engineering, despite the discipline’s popularity in informal learning contexts (e.g., afterschool programs, library workshops, or camps) [1]-[3]. In this National Science Foundation Advancing Informal Science Learning (NSF AISL)-funded research study, we are investigating ways to support informal educators in leading high-quality engineering activities in out-of-school time (OST) contexts. This multi-year study focuses on understanding OST educators’ instructional strategies during participation in a Community of Practice-style professional development experience and subsequent teaching of OST engineering programs for rural elementary-aged youth. In Year 1, we engaged six OST educators in a collaborative virtual Community of Practice to design and teach a series of six engineering lessons to rural youth ages 8-12. In the Community of Practice meetings, researchers and OST educators discussed engineering pedagogical practices, considered goals of teaching engineering to youth, and co-developed the engineering curriculum. While the broader goal of this study is to specifically understand educators’ pedagogical talk moves - the verbal questions and statements educators say to youth working independently or in small groups during engineering activities - in this first year of the project, we did not explicitly introduce or emphasize talk moves as an instructional strategy. Talk moves are one tool that educators can use to elicit learners’ engineering reasoning and sensemaking, encourage explorative learning, and support productive participation in engineering design [4], [5]. In the first phase of this study, we focused on capturing and characterizing experienced STEM educators’ existing instructional strategies and talk moves in OST engineering through recordings of the bi-monthly Community of Practice meetings, pre-post individual educator interviews, teaching observations, and group reflections on engineering enactments. In this poster presentation and associated paper, we will present key findings from Year 1, including the instructional strategies suggested or noticed by OST Educators over the course of the first project year. We saw emergent themes around instructional strategies, including a focus on pre-instructional planning, framing, engineering norms, mid-design talk moves, and real-world contexts. Going forward in this study, we are working with an expanded group of OST educators, with whom we will deliberately engage in developing and utilizing engineering talk moves, among other instructional strategies, and we will also begin examining the possible effect of changes in instructional strategies on youth participation in engineering during these programs. 

Background:Engineering's introduction into K–12 classrooms has been purported to support meaningful and inclusive learning environments. However, teachers must contend with dominant discourses embedded in US schooling that justify inequitable distributions of resources. Purpose:Drawing on Gee's notion of discourses, we examine how teachers incorporate language legitimizing socially and culturally constructed values and beliefs. In particular, we focus on the discourse of ability hierarchy—reflecting dominant values of sorting and ranking students based on perceived academic abilities—and the discourse of individual blame—reflecting dominant framings of educational problems as solely the responsibility of individual students or families. We aim to understand how these discourses surface in teachers' reasoning about teaching engineering. Method:We interviewed 15 teachers enrolled in an online graduate program in engineering education. Utilizing critical discourse analysis, we analyzed how teachers drew on discourses of blame and ability hierarchy when reasoning about problems of practice in engineering. Results:Teachers drew on engineering education concepts to reinforce dominant discourses (echoing specific language and preserving given roles) as well as to disrupt (utilizing different language or roles that [implicitly] challenge) dominant discourses. Importantly, teachers could also retool discourses of ability hierarchy (arguing for a more equitable distribution of resources but problematically preserving the values of ranking and sorting students). Conclusions:K–12 schooling's sociohistorical context can shape how teachers make sense of engineering in ways that implicate race, gender, disability, and language, suggesting a need to grapple with how discourses from schooling—and engineering culture—maintain marginalizing environments for students. 

Abstract Engineering outreach programs often portray outreach educators as role models for youth. It is widely believed that introducing youth, especially girls, to potential engineering role models will broaden participation in engineering majors and careers. Based on interviews with and surveys of fourth- and fifth-grade girls participating in an engineering outreach program, we question whether youth are looking for career role models, and we challenge the assumption that youth will take up an adult as a role model simply because the adult is presented as such. We question what role these ‘‘models’’ play in the minds and lives of youth and argue that it may differ from what we expect. To be clear, we are not arguing that engineering role models are not important or not influential. Rather, we think it is important to gain a better understanding of how youth, particularly girls, view these potential engineering role models, which will allow us to optimize the significance of these adults to the youth participating in engineering outreach. 

Participating in discussions of classroom video can support teachers to attend to student thinking. Central to the success of these discussions is how teachers interpret the activity they are engaged in—how teachers frame what they are doing. In asynchronous online environments, negotiating framing poses challenges, given that interactions are not in real time and often require written text. We present findings from an online course designed to support teachers to frame video discussions as making sense of student thinking. In an engineering pedagogy course designed to emphasize responsiveness to students’ thinking, we documented shifts in teachers’ framing, with teachers more frequently making sense of, rather than evaluating, student thinking later in the course. These findings show that it is possible to design an asynchronous online course to productively engage teachers in video discussions and inform theory development in online teacher education. 

Abstract Background:Despite the prevalence and potential of K–12 engineering outreach programs, the moment‐to‐moment dynamics of outreach educators' facilitation of engineering learning experiences are understudied. There is a need to identify outreach educators' teaching moves and to explore the implications of these moves. Purpose/Hypothesis:We offer a preliminary framework for characterizing engineering outreach educators' teaching moves in relation to principles of ambitious instruction. This study describes outreach educators' teaching moves and identifies learning opportunities afforded by these moves. Design/Method:Through discourse analysis of video recordings of a university‐led engineering outreach program, we identified teaching moves of novice engineering outreach educators in interaction with elementary student design teams. We considered 18 outreach educators' teaching moves through a lens of ambitious instruction. Results:In small group interactions, outreach educators used ambitious, conservative, and inclusive teaching moves. These novice educators utilized talk moves that centered students' ideas and agency. Ambitious moves included two novel teaching moves: design check‐ins and revoicing tangible manifestations of students' ideas. Ambitious moves offered students opportunities to engage in engineering design. Conservative moves provided opportunities for students to make technical and affective progress, and to experience engineering norms. Conclusions:Our work is formative in describing engineering outreach educators' teaching moves and points to outreach educators' capability in using ambitious moves. Ambitious engineering instruction may be a useful framework for designing engineering outreach to support students' participation and progress in engineering design. Additionally, conservative teaching moves, typically considered constraining, may support productive student affect and engagement in engineering design. 

As K-12 engineering education becomes more ubiquitous in the U.S, increased attention has been paid to preparing the heterogeneous group of in-service teachers who have taken on the challenge of teaching engineering. Standards have emerged for professional development along with research on teacher learning in engineering that call for teachers to facilitate and support engineering learning environments. Given that many teachers may not have experienced engineering practice calls have been made to engage teaches K-12 teachers in the “doing” of engineering as part of their preparation. However, there is a need for research studying more specific nature of the “doing” and the instructional implications for engaging teachers in “doing” engineering. In general, to date, limited time and constrained resources necessitate that many professional development programs for K-12 teachers to engage participants in the same engineering activities they will enact with their students. While this approach supports teachers’ familiarity with curriculum and ability to anticipate students’ ideas, there is reason to believe that these experiences may not be authentic enough to support teachers in developing a rich understanding of the “doing” of engineering. K-12 teachers are often familiar with the materials and curricular solutions, given their experiences as adults, which means that engaging in the same tasks as their students may not be challenging enough to develop their understandings about engineering. This can then be consequential for their pedagogy: In our prior work, we found that teachers’ linear conceptions of the engineering design process can limit them from recognizing and supporting student engagement in productive design practices. Research on the development of engineering design practices with adults in undergraduate and professional engineering settings has shown significant differences in how adults approach and understand problems. Therefore, we conjectured that engaging teachers in more rigorous engineering challenges designed for adult engineering novices would more readily support their developing rich understandings of the ways in which professional engineers move through the design process. We term this approach meaningful engineering for teachers, and it is informed by work in science education that highlights the importance of learning environments creating a need for learners to develop and engage in disciplinary practices. We explored this approach to teachers’ professional learning experiences in doing engineering in an online graduate program for in-service teachers in engineering education at Tufts University entitled the Teacher Engineering Education Program (teep.tufts.edu). In this exploratory study, we asked: 1. How did teachers respond to engaging in meaningful engineering for teachers in the TEEP program? 2. What did teachers identify as important things they learned about engineering content and pedagogy? This paper focuses on one theme that emerged from teachers’ reflections. Our analysis found that teachers reported that meaningful engineering supported their development of epistemic empathy (“the act of understanding and appreciating someone's cognitive and emotional experience within an epistemic activity”) as a result of their own affective experiences in doing engineering that required significant iteration as well as using novel robotic materials. We consider how epistemic empathy may be an important aspect of teacher learning in K-12 engineering education and the potential implications for designing engineering teacher education. 

Developing a strong engineering identity, or sense of belonging in engineering, is essential to pursuing and persisting in the field. Participating in an engineering outreach program is widely seen as an opportunity for youth to ignite and increase an identity as an engineer. As early as elementary school, youth evaluate their experiences, interests, and successes to make choices about possible futures. Although these early experiences and choices influence future participation in, pursuit of, and persistence in engineering, studies of engineering identity development have concentrated on undergraduate and high school learners. This study examines engineering identity development in elementary school students participating in an engineering education outreach program, expanding understanding of early influences on engineering identity formation. This study asks: How do students’ descriptions of their engineering experiences indicate the influence their experiences have on their engineering identity development? This study is embedded in an NSF-funded study of a university-led engineering education outreach program. In this program, pairs of university students facilitated weekly hour-long engineering design challenges in elementary classrooms throughout the school year. At the end of the academic year, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 76 fourth- and fifth-grade students who had participated in the outreach program. The interviewers asked students to rate their enjoyment of and skills in engineering within the context of the program. Iterative qualitative coding was used to elicit emergent patterns in students’ responses and examine them in the context of the Godwin et al (2016) engineering identity framework, using the constructs of interest, performance/competence, and recognition. Responses were then analyzed based on participants’ gender to understand and identify potential differences in influences on engineering identity development. Findings indicate that student talk around interest tended to be more positive, while student talk around performance/competence tended to be more negative, indicating the type of relationships students had with their interest in engineering compared to their perceived skills in doing engineering. However, within the construct of performance/competence, girls used negative language at a higher frequency than boys. Within this construct-based code, there were categories with large variations in positive and negative talk by gender. These gendered patterns provide insight into the differing ways girls and boys interact with engineering and how they start to develop engineering identities.