2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Over the last several decades, there are an increasing number of programs designed to engage young children and their families in engineering design. To ensure that these efforts are successful, it is critical that programs directly connect with and support the prior interests and experiences of children and their families. Unfortunately, the voices and perspectives of youth and families participating in these programs have been notably absent from the engineering education literature, especially for individuals from historically marginalized communities. Equity scholars in the engineering education field have noted how educators and researchers have struggled to rethink the historically colonialist and hegemonic perspectives that have dominated the field and continue to serve as central barriers to diversifying engineering careers. In this ongoing study, we are working to elevate the voices of parents and young children from low-income Spanish- and English-speaking families in our community and better understand the ways that they connect engineering to their own interests, goals, and values. The study is part of an ongoing design-based implementation research project, in partnership with our local Head Start program, designed to develop engineering programs for preschool-aged children and their families and simultaneously study how these experiences shape families’ long-term interests related to engineering. Through longitudinal, qualitative data collection and analysis, we are developing case studies of family experiences with the program and they ways that both children and adults subsequently continue to think about and engage with engineering 1 to 2 years after the program ends.