2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Purpose
NGSS highlights the importance of connecting engineering to local contexts, particularly to support the learning and engagement of students from historically marginalized groups in STEM. However, teachers often lack self-efficacy in teaching engineering, which impacts quality of instruction, use of student-centered connections, and student outcomes (Hammack & Ivey, 2017). Using a Culturally Relevant Engineering Design (CRED) Framework (Author, 2024) that allows students to solve meaningful problems in their community through engineering can increase relevance and deepen science and engineering understandings for all students but requires on-going professional development (PD) for teachers to increase their engineering teaching self-efficacy and culturally relevant teaching self-efficacy.

We conducted a two-year PD for 15 elementary and middle school teachers using the CRED Framework to develop their self-efficacy in implementing culturally relevant engineering design tasks in their classrooms. Project results show a promising picture of teachers increasing their self-efficacy and transforming their teaching practice. This instrumental case study (Crowe et al., 2011) explores the lived experiences of three participants who showed particularly marked growth in their self-efficacy throughout the PD. We aim to better understand how they experienced the PD and to identify factors outside of self-efficacy that can militate against classroom practice, as well as strategies these teachers used to mitigate them. The following research questions guide this study:
- How do teachers with culturally relevant engineering teaching self-efficacy describe their learning trajectories, instructional shifts, and impacts from PD?
- What do teachers with culturally relevant engineering teaching self-efficacy perceive as challenges with implementing CRED-aligned tasks? What strategies do they use to address such challenges?

Methods
Over the course of the two-year PD, teachers developed and implemented six CRED-aligned engineering design tasks in their classrooms, participating in an on-going PD model that emphasized strategies for connecting engineering to local contexts and best practices in engineering instruction and culturally relevant pedagogy. Data sources for this case study include six 30-minute segments of classroom video footage and six 30-minute individual interviews from the three case study teachers. We coded their classroom video data using a modified version of the Classroom Observation Protocol for Engineering Design (COPED) (Wheeler, et al., 2019), focusing on types of teacher and student interactions and elements of culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995). We coded their individual interviews using thematic analysis (Braun & Clark, 2012), focusing on elements from the CRED and sources of self-efficacy.

Preliminary Findings
Analysis of individual interviews and classroom lesson footage identified both unique and common aspects of the three teachers’ trajectories and experiences. For all teachers, considering one’s own awareness of community and culture was supportive of increases in self-efficacy, as were opportunities for collaboration and reflection. Challenges, such as time, scheduling, and materials management, while most often falling under the theme of practice, pedagogy, and classroom structures, were more unique across the three cases and connected to their specific context and teaching situations. The full paper will present rich descriptions of the individual cases and implications for understanding the challenges of implementing culturally relevant engineering design.