2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

“I Feel Very Good Speaking My Language”: Supporting Middle School Youth’s Multilingual Competencies in Engineering through Tech Journalism [WORK IN PROGRESS]

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

In K-12 classrooms, students rarely have opportunities to draw on the richness of their backgrounds to critically analyze and communicate about climate technologies, nor do they engage in designing meaningful solutions to address large societal and environmental challenges. Yet, young people, who see the world through the lens of their community’s language and cultural resources, are at the forefront of these conversations. Through a design-based research study, our work seeks to explore how 6th-grade students in an urban district in the U.S. Northeast utilize their community resources, language, and culture when learning about engineering through a climate tech journalism curriculum called Community Tech Press (CTP). During the unit, students created multilingual/multidialectal journalism pieces to inform their community about climate technology. Following a grounded theory approach, we documented the ways in which youth described access to learning in different languages as a way to (i) expand the messages for diverse external audiences, and (ii) express their linguistic identities in and outside of engineering. By engaging young people in understanding how societal choices about climate technologies and solutions affect their locale, we seek to inspire action in youth with and for their communities to craft critical journalistic messages for people like themselves.

Authors

L. Clara Mabour http://orcid.org/0009-0008-0804-7176 Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach [biography]

Clara Mabour is a third-year STEM Education Ph.D. student at Tufts University. She is a former high school STEM teacher who has also developed after-school STEM and Invention education programming for K-12 students in South Florida. Her experiences as a Haitian immigrant and maker have shaped her teaching approaches and research interests. Clara researches how people's histories with materials influence their human-material interactions and STEM learning during informal engineering projects and maker spaces. Major themes of her work include the intersections of culture and making, material agency, and collaborations in K-12 informal learning spaces.
Dr. Greses Perez P.E. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4737-0888 Tufts University [biography]

Greses A. Pérez is a Ph.D. student in Learning Sciences and Technology Design with a focus on engineering education. Before coming to Stanford, Greses was a bilingual math and science educator at public elementary schools in Texas, where she served in the Gifted and Talented Advisory District Committee and the Elementary Curriculum Design team. As a science mentor at the Perot Museum, Greses locally supported the development of teachers by facilitating workshops and creating science classroom kits. She taught in bilingual, Montessori and university classrooms in Texas and in Dominican Republic. She earned a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Santo Domingo Technological Institute (INTEC) and a M.Eng. in Environmental Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM) as well as a M.Ed. degree in School Leadership from Southern Methodist University (SMU). Her current research interests are located at the intersection of science and engineering education, multilingualism and emerging technologies. Prior to starting her career in education, Greses was a project manager for engineering projects and hydrologic and hydraulic studies.
Dr. Kristen B Wendell Tufts University [biography]

Kristen Wendell is Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Education at Tufts University. Her research efforts at the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach focus on supporting discourse and design practices among engineering learners from all backgrounds and at all levels.
Ms. Fatima Rahman Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach [biography]

STEM Education graduate student at Tufts University
Dr. Chelsea Joy Andrews http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9017-595X Tufts University [biography]

Chelsea Andrews is a Research Assistant Professor at Tufts University, at the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO).

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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