2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this NSF grantees poster session, we will report on our NSF DRK-12 “Community Tech Press” project, funded by the Division of Research on Learning. In this project, we are developing, enacting, and studying a critical climate tech journalism curriculum to support multilingual sixth grade students’ engineering knowledge and practices. Our 20-lesson unit synthesizes research findings from climate tech, climate advocacy, communication, and multilingual education, to provide students opportunities to investigate, design, and communicate critical engineering knowledge about community-based technological systems. Composed of threads of engineering, community, and climate change, the civic-oriented curriculum supports student groups in creating a multilingual, multimodal journalism piece to inform their community about a locally-relevant climate technology engineered to address climate change.

Our research in this project centers around characterizing: (1) student learning outcomes, particularly practices of engineering, communication, and translanguaging, their ideas about climate tech, and their perceptions of the value of engineering and technical communication for the community; (2) the community resources students draw on as they participate in the curriculum; and (3) the influence of curriculum resources and teacher facilitation moves on student learning outcomes.

In this poster, we will highlight two research studies that have emerged from this project. Using qualitative approaches, we analyze videorecorded lessons, interviews with teachers and students, and student and teacher artifacts.

The first study analyzes end-of-unit interviews with three students, who represented the wide racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity of the classroom, to explore the connections they drew between themselves, their community, science, and engineering. We found that all three students centered their own experiences and community resources in their final video journalism projects, whether that meant focusing explicitly on differentially racist climate change impacts or the technical knowledge of how a particular climate tech works. At the same time, all three students recognized tensions constraining the possible actions they could take to push for change in their own community and their in-class video journalism project. These tensions included classroom time constraints, limitations in power, and majority norms and practices.

The second study focuses on how multilingual students drew on their linguistic and cultural resources when learning about engineering through the climate tech journalism curriculum. Looking across interviews and lesson recordings, we saw students understood the value of their own multilingualism in this engineering curriculum and welcomed the opportunities to draw on their vast language and cultural resources. Students described access to learning in different languages as a way to (i) create possibilities for solutions to address the cultural traditions of people, (ii) expand the messages for external audiences, and (iii) to listen and be listened to through experiences and artifacts.

This project aims to empower diverse youth to critically analyze and communicate climate justice in their community while enhancing their capacity to participate in engineering design practices in culturally meaningful ways.