Toward Social-Spatial-Justice: Disrupting Inequities by Exploring Intersectionality and Rightful Presence in Girls' Engineering Learning Experiences

• In Event: Diversity and Representation: Experiences That Support Effective Engineering Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Understanding girls’ identity formation intersections between their social and learning spaces, and how these negotiated identities relate to why girls engineer, is important to establishing their rightful presence in engineering. These critical ethnography case studies of all-girl groups (n = 8) engaged in a three-week unit of [community-based sustainable engineering (Eng)] in three sixth grade public middle school science classes (N = 51) explore how they brought problems from girls’ spaces that were not necessarily in the classroom into their authentic problem-solving exercises in engineering learning to be transformative toward justice in their social spaces. [Eng] acted to unify spaces traditionally separated from science with engineering learning and seed moments of rightful presence by allowing epistemic plurality that included sociocultural perspectives.

Authors

• Aerin W Benavides, University of North Carolina - Greensboro

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan