Interacting Scales of Community Concerns: Youth as Community Engineering Ethnographers in Engineering Design

• In Event: 52.047 - Critical Intersections of Pedagogies and Research Methodologies to Value Youths' Whole Lives in STEM Engagement

Abstract

The impetus for STEM reform focuses primarily on workforce interests and international competitiveness drivers (Holdren, Marrett, & Suresh, 2013). Such focus blinds attention to the systemic ways in which inequality is reproduced in schools, such as how youth and community needs are de-sanctioned, positioning youth as outsiders, unrecognized for the assets they bring to STEM learning (Varelas, 2012).

We examine how engaging youth as ‘community engineering ethnographers’ during the engineering design process can support learning and identity development. Research questions include:
How do youth engage in defining engineering problems through community ethnography?
How does this engagement shape identity work in engineering?

Drawing from social practice theory, we view identity as taking shape dynamically in-the-moment as one enacts practices in interaction with activities, people, and resources (Holland & Lave, 2009). Power dynamics are crucial in this process: How one is positioned by and reacts to a range of people and institutional/cultural structures shapes recognition opportunities (Nasir, 2011).

We used participatory critical ethnography in framing our instruction and analysis of youths’ experiences in a summer energy engineering unit about sustainable communities. Participants directed how engineering problems were defined and how we collaboratively sought action to address them towards empowering ends (Cammarota & Fine, 2008). 10 girls participated from a range of ethnic/racial and SES backgrounds. Data sources include participant observations, classroom videos, youth-produced videos, surveys, interviews, and student artifacts. Our conceptual framework guided the participant member-checked data analysis.

Participating in community ethnography through repeatedly engaging in dialog with community at different design stages supported the girls in defining/identifying with interconnected scales of community concerns (e.g. local immediate concerns, global concerns). At each juncture girls responded to community concerns while improving technological and social dimensions of their designs. Some girls used tensions between scales as places of decision-making that sets constraints in their design. Others worked within scales. This variation across projects provided different in-roads to STEM engagement and identity work. For example, two girls designed a “Woot Wall” (sustainable light-up student achievements board) to promote positive classroom community. They also focused on the larger scale of global energy sustainability. These interconnected concerns led to more technically complex and community-responsive iterations of design (e.g., hand-crank powered LEDs in parallel circuit). Throughout this unit, the girls were positioned and recognized as community and STEM experts capable of engineering sustainable inventions. The girls recognized that their engineering expertise disrupted dominant narratives about who can be successful in STEM. Emilia, a 12-year-old African American girl explains:

Researcher: If someone saw your picture and asked, "Is Emilia a scientist?" what would you say?
Emilia: I would say ‘yes’ especially if there was a picture of the Woot Wall in the background. . . I told my entire family about it. I said stuff like, ‘Hey, we are working on this cool project using alternative energy.’ They are interested about it. I am sure they have told their friends.

Promoting engagement with the layered dimensions of community problem spaces supports youth in participating in empowering STEM education.

Authors

• Kathleen Schenkel, Michigan State University

• Angela Calabrese Barton, Michigan State University

• Christina Restrepo Nazar, Michigan State University

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Marcos D. González Flores, Michigan State University