2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work presents a paper regarding teacher development around engineering and language. Particularly, this work examines how elementary teachers engage in teaching engineering to their classrooms which contain multilingual students, using the lens of translanguaging.
Literature on professional development projects with US public school teachers has shown that sustained professional development programs have more impact on teacher learning. As the new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) emphasize the role of pre-college engineering, and since public school teachers rarely have familiarity with engineering concepts, they need more knowledge of engineering.
This is especially important as the number of multilingual learners in US public school classrooms are rapidly increasing, necessitating new practices by teachers and support structures to better assist these students’ learning. A major motivation for our work is to counter the assumption often made within formal education in the US that these emergent multilingual students do not have the capacity or linguistic skills to engage in conceptually challenging topics such as science, engineering, or STEM inquiry. Engineering provides a new area for shared learning in the classroom.
Our work emphasized a sustained professional development project with elementary school teachers in US Public schools who have multilingual learners in their classrooms. Teachers were recruited for a summer Professional Learning Experience (PLE) and several half-day workshops throughout the school year. In PLE sessions, we worked with the teachers introduce key concepts about engineering, translanguaging, and how to apply these topics within their classrooms. Translanguaging is an inclusive language ideology for multilingual learners which empowers them to leverage their full language repertoires (in whatever language or dialect), rather than forcing them to use exclusively the language of instruction. This allows students to engage in learning with the language resources they currently possess rather than delaying participation until a higher proficiency in English is acquired.
This paper examines the engineering knowledge growth and usage of translanguaging techniques via a case study of one third-grade teacher who developed and delivered an engineering unit within her classroom. We examine her changing positions related to engineering and her usage of language within this project and across one year of participation in the program. We consider her as a learner of engineering topics and also an experienced teacher who is applying these ideas into her own practice and classroom setting.
To present this case study, we analyzed interview data, transcripts and recordings of our PD sessions, and informal discussions with the teacher. We also examined classroom recordings, student artifacts, and audio of her interacting with individual students. Preliminary findings show how the teacher went from being a novice in engineering to understanding that problem solutions require multiple iterations. Furthermore, we discovered that this teacher was already infusing some translanguaging practices in her class environment.
Implications of this work include a better understanding of how elementary teachers navigate the challenge of teaching engineering to students and how these teachers specifically plan for, scaffold, and include the engagement of their multilingual students within these lessons.