Our Hearts Felt Warm: Consequential Learning Through Optimizing Engineering Designs in Middle-Grade Science Classrooms

• In Event: Science Teaching and Learning Toward Collaborative Social Transformation and Justice

Abstract

Objectives: Classroom teaching and learning typically orients towards assessments that evaluate student mastery of narrowly defined curricular goals of dominant disciplines rather than students’ rich ways of knowing, action-taking or relationalities (Au, 2011). Furthermore, such practices are rooted in white supremacist and patriarchal ideals of what it means to know and become in school settings (hooks, 1994). We collaborated with teachers and students, in the context of middle grades engineering, to disrupt these dominant practices, by focusing on supporting authentically engineering designs for sustainable — happy, healthy and just — school communities. Particularly, we investigated the role and importance of the “afterlife” of students’ engineering projects. We explored:
1) How do teachers and students collaborate to design and use engineering designs that support happy, healthy and just schools collectively over time?
2) How does this process support consequential learning opportunities?

Framework: A consequential learning approach framed this study. Consequential learning focuses on the collective and political process that supports meaningful action across time, space and relations (Jurow & Shea, 2015). We further operationalize “consequentiality” as the direct results of youth leveraging science learning opportunities toward transformative outcomes in their learning and perturbing injustices that matter (Authors, 2018). This approach challenges dominant schooling practices.

Methods: Using a youth participatory action research approach (Mirra, Garcia & Morrell, 2015), we worked with students in two racially-diverse (Asian 7%, American Indian 1%, Hispanic 24%, Black 31%, White 29%, multiracial 8%) classrooms to analyze and optimize their engineering designs’ impact. Data included pre/post-interviews with 13 students, class video-recordings, focal groups’ work sessions recordings, and conversation groups. Analysis focused on shifts in interactions across space, time and relationships.

Findings: We report two main findings. First, through on-going analysis and optimization of the technical and social dimensions of their engineering designs, students challenged/transformed whose expertise mattered and why. Second, this optimization process supported students in designing new humanizing schools norms, and being recognized for their hybrid expertise by themselves, their classmates and school staff.
For example, a group of students created the Joy Box. Students and staff placed positive messages in a hand crank-powered light-up box the group designed, and weekly the group delivered the messages to each classroom while lighting the Joy Box.
Student-creators worried their initial design was “useless” when they realized the school social worker could not use it because her office was too small. Exchanging design ideas with additional stakeholders through letters to teachers, presentations to other classes, discussions with office staff, students refined the engineering design (e.g., circuit type, how to enclose wires inside the box, where to put it and how to use it). Student-creators described having their “hearts feel warm” as their schoolwide positive message delivery system was used by the school community. Students also challenged powered relationalities for determining school norms, and were recognized for their science and community expertise in the process.

Significance: By engaging multiple people/perspectives in optimizing and integrating authentic engineering designs for sustainable classrooms, students had opportunities to disrupt and transform dominant oppressions norms around learning and participation.

Authors

• Kathleen Schenkel, San Diego State University

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro