Culturally Responsive Engineering Experience Design and Development through Teacher-Undergraduate Engineering Student Partnerships

Engineering is everywhere and K-12 teachers are increasingly tasked with teaching engineering content in ways that meet state educational standards and in ways that engage students from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. As teachers strive to meet these twin requirements, of accountability and responsiveness, they face two major challenges. First, teachers have limited experiential or professional preparation for teaching engineering content effectively.

Second, engineering culture in its current state does not equitably engage diverse learners and has historically excluded and marginalized people from minoritized racial and ethnic populations. Reproducing engineering in K-12 as it has existed in post-secondary education may reproduce this historical exclusion and marginalization. While K-12 teachers have increasing access to resources that support their teaching of engineering content, this work will generate new ways to support teachers’ roles as change agents in enacting engineering pedagogies centering those who have been historically excluded.

This three-year early-stage design and development project will support a new teacher professional development and support model that builds the agency of 30 Miami-Dade County public high school science teachers to design, implement, and refine engineering instruction for their Latinx and Black students who comprise more than 90% of their local public-school population. A unique feature of the Culturally Responsive Engineering Experience Design and Development (CREED2) program is its partnering of high school teachers with Latinx and Black undergraduate engineering students in collaborative teams to co-design and implement inclusive, standards-aligned formal and informal engineering experiences.

Using mixed methods (i.e., interviews, focus groups, surveys and observation), the team will examine the project’s impact on high school teachers’: (a) identities as culturally responsive teachers-of-engineering; (b) agency in designing and teaching K-12 engineering experiences; (c) integration of engineering in ways that are responsive to their Latinx and Black high school students; and (d) experience of the teacher-engineer partnerships embedded in the professional development program. The project also examines how near-peer mentoring by engineering students with shared ethnic and/or racial identities influences Latinx and Black high school students’ classroom experiences with engineering.

The project represents partnerships among university faculty, university student organizations (Society of Women Engineers, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, National Society of Black Engineers), high school teachers, and diversity professionals including industry through the National Association of Multicultural Engineering Program Advocates. The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools.

Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects. 

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.