Innovating With Scientists, Engineers, and Community Members: Youths' Engineering Design and Networks of Experts

• In Event: Learning to Engage: Scientists, Engineers, Educators, and Youth in Learning Collaborations

Abstract

In our work in community settings, we have been interested in how youth investigate and take action on scientific issues that matter to them and their communities. Given the 2016 AERA theme of engaging with the public, we have investigated the role that youth interactions with a range of experts -- including STEM and community-based -- play in their efforts to engage in engineering for the public good. Research questions include:
1. How does doing engineering for the public good shape the ways in which youth framed their engineering problems and design solutions as they interacted with a range of STEM and community experts?
2. How and for what purposes did the youth leverage interactions with STEM and with community experts in their engineering design work for the public good?

We take an expansive view of learning across settings and over time (Engeström & Sannino, 2010). This perspective challenges settled notions of what it means to participate in practice within community by making visible the boundaries of formal/informal, novice/expert, and past/present/future, and how these boundaries change over time and across scale (Rahm, 2014). They provide tools for seeing learning and doing as situated within local practice, and as involving the re-mixing of ideas, tools and practices as new possibilities for becoming in-practice (Gutiérrez, 2012).

Qualitative data include participant observations in the afterschool club and community as they gathered ideas and insights (78 hours), conversation groups (36 hours), artifact-based interviews (twice during the year), and student artifact collections. Data analysis was guided by our conceptual framework and member-checked by participants.

We present three differing cases of youth (11-13 years old) engaged in engineering design on safety issues in a community makerspace: 1) Two girls who prototyped a solar powered heated sweatshirt to keep people warm and from being bullied. 2) A boy who designed a solar powered light up football for use in the dark when streetlights don’t work. 3) Three boys (with on-going input from one girl) who made a “phantom jacket” for protection against bullies, robbers, and police. All youth were members of a maker club housed in a community center serving low-income youth in a Midwestern city.

These cases illustrate how youth expanded the boundaries of participation in engineering through multiple and far-ranging interactions, reshaping how learning engineering design might be refigured towards the public good. We found that as youth connected with networks of experts, they negotiated technical/social dimensions of their engineering design with increasing complexity (e.g., how they framed the vulnerabilities of their communities such as access, cost as well as the particular technical specifications they cared about). Connections with experts also served as pathway brokers for youth to delve deeply into both the content and community needs. Lastly, youth drew differentially upon expert ideas and input as “sources” of legitimization for how and why they re-purposed and re-mixed community and technical ideas, tools, and practices acquired as they navigated and brokered across a range of communities of practices.

Authors

• Angela Calabrese Barton, Michigan State University

• Myunghwan Shin, Michigan State University

• Day W Greenberg, Michigan State University

• Christina Restrepo Nazar, Michigan State University