2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

One teacher’s approach to supporting multilingual learners through community-connected engineering design (fundamental)

Presented at Pre-College Engineering Education Division (PCEE) Technical Session 6

The NGSS highlights the importance of connecting engineering to place and context, to support the learning and engagement of all students in STEM (NGSS Lead States, Appendix I, 2013). A Culturally Relevant Engineering Design (CRED) Framework (Bowman et al., 2024) that allows students to solve meaningful problems through engineering in their local community can increase relevance and deepen science and engineering understandings for all students. The purpose of this single case study was to understand how these community and localized connections and culturally responsive approaches can be infused throughout all stages of the engineering design process to support all learners. Our focal participant, Serena, is a female 4th grade teacher with 8 years of classroom teaching experience in a rural school. She identifies as a Hispanic female and is fluent in both Spanish and English. All of her 17 students are Hispanic, with 15 being classified as English learners.

Serena recorded herself teaching a multi-day engineering lesson focused on a locally relevant issue. Through analysis of classroom video and lesson plan data, we identified specific examples in each stage of the CRED where the focal teacher purposefully connected classroom instruction to the local context and embedded specific ties to her students’ community and culture during each lesson sequence. She also utilized various strategies to support multilingual learners throughout the lesson sequence, such as drawing on students’ culture to shape instruction and communicating in linguistically and culturally responsive ways.

Authors

Dr. Rebekah J Hammack http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8621-1006 Purdue University at West Lafayette (PPI) [biography]

Rebekah Hammack is an Assistant Professor of K-8 Science Education at Purdue University. She served as an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow in the Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Learning. Dr. Hammack’s research focuses on the connection of local contexts to STEM interest and identity development in youth, particularly rural youth in elementary and middle grades, as well as how elementary teachers develop teaching efficacy and identity as STEM educators. Through her research, Dr. Hammack aims to advance understanding of how to enhance STEM education in rural schools and communities, providing opportunities to meet the unique needs of rural students.
Julie Robinson University of North Dakota [biography]

Dr. Julie Robinson is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Dakota and the Director of UND’s Center for Engineering Education Research. Her research explores strategies for broadening access and participation in STEM, focusing on culturally relevant pedagogy in science and engineering. She also investigates strategies for increasing representation in STEM through teacher professional learning opportunities and by exploring the impact of group gender composition on girls’ motivation and engagement. Dr. Robinson is a PI and Co-PI on several NSF sponsored grant projects which focus on teacher professional learning and self-efficacy with implementing culturally relevant engineering education, connecting to place and community, and centering culture and Indigeneity within STEM education. Dr. Robinson has over twenty years of K – 12 teaching experience, including seven years as a teacher leader of professional development in the Next Generation Science Standards, the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics, and in elementary science and engineering pedagogy.
Jenna Gist Purdue University
Min Jung Lee University of North Dakota
Dr. Tugba Boz Indiana-Purdue University [biography]

Dr. Tugba Boz works as a postdoctoral scholar at PURDUE UNIVERSITY.
Stephanie Oudghiri
Lauren Cabrera Purdue University at West Lafayette (PPI)

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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Pre-College
Broadening Participation in Engineering and Engineering Technology