Advancing Latine Children’s Informal Engineering Learning through Tinkering and Oral Storytelling

• In Event: Children’s Informal STEM Learning Within Family Interactions: Cultural Strengths of Families from Non-Dominant Communities

Abstract

Research grounded in sociocultural theories of child development (Rogoff, 2003; Vygotsky, 1978) provide evidence for the role of parent-child conversations during events, and conversational reflections afterward, for supporting children’s informal STEM learning (Callanan et al., 2017; Haden et al., 2014). Nonetheless, our understanding of children’s learning mostly comes from studies conducted with European-American, English-speaking, middle-class families. Researchers need to consider diverse oral practices that can support STEM learning among children from non-dominant communities. In this project, we focused on Latine families whose cultural background originated in Latin America. Latines constitute a growing segment of the U.S. population and are traditionally underrepresented in STEM. We observed Latine families tinkering at home. Tinkering is an open-ended, problem-solving activity that can provide engineering learning opportunities that may be especially accessible for young children. We infused a strengths-based approach by pairing tinkering with oral storytelling, a pervasive everyday practice in Latine families, firmly rooted in Latin American oral traditions (McDowell et al., 1993; Sánchez, 2009).

Fifty-two Latine parents and their 4-10 year-old children connected with a bilingual researcher virtually and engaged in an at-home tinkering activity. Families were randomly assigned to either a story condition, where families were invited to make a hat for a party and create a story about their party hat, or a no-story condition, where families made a hat with no story context. Immediately after tinkering, and again approximately two weeks later, children shared their reflections on their tinkering experience. Families’ tinkering observations and the children’s reflections were transcribed and coded in their original language (Spanish and/or English) for engineering practice talk (e.g., testing, redesigning). We predicted that families in the story condition would engage in the most engineering talk during tinkering, and in their children’s immediate and delayed reflections.

In support of our hypothesis, parents in the story condition talked more about engineering during tinkering (M = 19.16) compared to parents in the no-story condition (M = 12.77), F(1, 48) = 10.74, p = .002. Similarly, children in the story condition used more engineering talk as they tinkered (M = 9.19) than children in the no-story group (M = 5.84), F(1, 49) = 6.20, p = .016. Repeated measures analyses on the children’s reflections revealed a significant condition x time interaction effect, F(1, 46) = 6.63, p = .013, with children in the story condition talking the most about engineering in their reflections immediately post-tinkering and weeks later compared to children in the no-story group. Further, most families in the story condition (53.8%) organically created party hat stories that were personally meaningful by involving family and friends or familiar settings, or using their prior experiences to help build the narrative (e.g., “Think about the parties that we’ve been to. What did you do at the parties?”).

These findings extend theoretical and empirical work on how conversations both during and after activities can support Latine children’s engineering learning. We discuss the implications of how incorporating families’ everyday practices can support strengths-based interpretations of informal learning opportunities among non-dominant communities.

Authors

• Diana I Acosta, University of California - Santa Cruz
  Presenting Author

• Catherine A. Haden, Loyola University Chicago