Care Praxis–Driven Engineering Design: A Pathway to Advance Justice in Middle School STEM

• In Event: Empowering Students Through Innovative Pedagogies in Environmental and Climate Change Education

Abstract

This study explores how care praxis, a political and ethical approach to STEM education, supports students’ sense-making in addressing real-world problems. Using participatory critical design-based research, we collaborated with an urban middle school to adapt and implement a STEM curriculum focusing on engineering for sustainable communities. Findings show how care praxis enhances students’ expansive sense-making by enacting care-oriented, community-engaged engineering practices through four stages: caring about social needs (“identifying problems”), taking care by solidifying needs (“refining problems”), caregiving by designing solutions (“designing solutions”), and nesting care by expanding designs to community building (“Integrating into everyday life”). We argue that care praxis bridges different onto-epistemologies, creating productive spaces for students to engage in sense-making around humanization and justice-oriented engineering.

Authors

• Wisam Sedawi, University of Michigan

• Angela Calabrese, University of Michigan

• Edna Tan, University of North Carolina - Greensboro