2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

he United States has and will continue to have an increase of English language learners, or emerging multilingual students, in elementary school classrooms. Typically, these students are not given the same access to science and engineering lessons as their English speaking peers, as some argue they do not have the lingual resources, or enough English, to participate in these activities. Our project, along with a growing number of scholars in science education and engineering education, posits that these students can bring all their linguistic and cultural resources, including their home languages, to their engagement in engineering work.

Despite the introduction of engineering into state and national standards through the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), professional development in engineering education for elementary teachers has not typically focused on engineering. This grant aims to serve the increasingly diverse school districts in our geographic region, and to develop a model for incorporating engineering into local classrooms, especially those with linguistically diverse students.

Our National Science Foundation Discovery Research PreK-12 funded project works with local elementary school teachers to create a sustained professional learning experience (PLE) for teachers of multilingual students to learn how to incorporate engineering lessons into their classrooms. Our project integrates translanguaging, or using all the language resources in any language that a student brings to the classroom, into engineering design activities. As we document our teachers learning to teach engineering with translanguaging, we examine their shifts in beliefs, values, and attitudes about how and where language can be used in the classroom, or their language ideologies. Currently in our second year of the project, our partner teachers have increased from two to ten in total, with a majority of project participants third grade classroom teachers. The project’s research questions are:
Do the teachers’ language ideologies shift, and if so, how?
How do teachers’ language ideologies, and possible shifts in language ideologies, map onto elements of the PLE?
How do teachers’ language ideologies, and possible shifts in language ideologies, map onto teachers’ engineering pedagogies?

This paper will share our current PLE model as well as the beginnings of the menu of engineering lessons, a resource for teachers. Our preliminary PLE model begins with three full-day meetings in the summer where we introduce engineering, engineering design, translanguaging, and language ideologies. During the school year, we also have half-day workshops once or every other month, and offer consultations with teachers as they plan their lessons. Our paper will also share our current draft of our engineering lesson menu, a resource we co-constructed with our year one participants after reflecting on their experiences teaching engineering during the first year. This resource organizes activities by length of time or that introduce engineering to and engineering design to students. Implications of this work include developing a better understanding of how elementary school teachers develop into teachers of engineering and creating a new model of engineering professional development.