Paper 8: Learning from Multilingual and Multidialectal Communities: The Everyday Origins of Engineering Practices

• In Event: Reimagining Researcher-Participant Relations in Engineering and Computing Education

Abstract

Objectives. Multilingual and multidialectal communities have a long history of resiliency strategies, from creating inclusive spaces to connecting people across languages and cultures to solving problems in their local context (Peralta, 2021). Yet, a rise of ultranationalism and recent political and humanitarian upheavals have led to tensions affecting these communities globally (Broadwater, 2025; The Economist, 2016). Experiencing vilification, multilingual and multidialectal communities remained united. This poster highlights resources of multilingual and multidialectal communities in national and international contexts where people engage in socially-oriented engineering problem-solving in their communities.

Theoretical framework. Synthesizing frameworks of equity and justice in science and engineering (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2019; Calabrese Barton et al., 2021a; Costanza-Chock, 2020; Morales‐Doyle, 2017) and translanguaging scholarship (García & Wei, 2014; Otheguy, García & Reid, 2015), we underscore the importance of resources to support thriving and engineering practices in multilingual and multidialectal communities. Encouraging the rightful presence of people in culturally and linguistically meaningful ways (Calabrese Barton et al., 2021b; Gutiérrez, 2012), this work hyperlocalized the robotics and engineering learning experiences by privileging local resources, ways of speaking and understanding the world, as the main disciplinary context. We define resources as the physical, symbolic, or sociocultural features of communities that influence learning by channeling behavior (Lahlou, 2018; Author, 2024).

Data Sources and Methods. This poster presents three examples of the relationships we have built with communities and researchers through three cases: An undergraduate engineering design course focused on games in the United States, an engineering and robotics program in Haitian-Dominican communities in the Dominican Republic and a community-oriented engineering project in Afro-descendent Latinx communities in the United States. Through these examples, we highlight the role of community resources (languaging, cognitive and cultural understandings) in designing collaborations and learning environments that generate positive change for people. We highlight collaborations between researchers, students, peers, family members, community groups, and civic leaders. Data includes video recordings of participants, interviews and artifacts. Following a grounded theory tradition, data were coded with a two-step iterative process of initial and focus coding followed by theoretical coding and conceptual development (Charmaz, 2017; Saldaña, 2009).

Findings. Across the cases, students consider racial, environmental, social, technical, and political complexities in thinking and engaging in engineering in their communities. Participants drew on their communicative systems and their transnational experiences to grapple with engineering problems. Through hybrid languaging, students made nuanced connections between communities and the discipline. This work highlights important tensions between researchers’ positionality, languaging, racialization and identity in understanding how communities access cognitive, linguistic and cultural resources when engaging in engineering design.

Significance. This research seeks a new vision for engineering learning environments where the resources of minoritized groups in multilingual and multidialectal communities inspire the futures we create. Our work stands in strong opposition to narratives deeming the translingual and cultural practices of people as less-than-human and as a threat to national identity. Our research documents the brilliance of communities elevating their hybrid systems of knowledge, practices and engineering identities in novel ways to solve problems in their local context.

Authors

• Greses Perez, Tufts University

• Philippa Eshun, Tufts University

• G.R. Marvez, Tufts University

• L. Clara Mabour, Tufts University

• Pragyee Shrestha, Tufts University

• Taisha Pierre, Tufts University

• Mia Jimenez, Tufts University

• Luis F. Suarez, Tufts University