2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Pre-college engineering education remains challenging for K12 STEM teachers since the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) (NGSS Lead States, 2013) specified engineering as a distinct component of the K12 science standards. While research has shown that when K12 students engage in engineering education, their interests, identities and epistemic understanding of science and mathematics are positively impacted, this impact is most immediately tied to the teacher (Ghalia et al, 2016). However, most K12 teachers feel ill-equipped to teach engineering (Hsu et al., 2011) due to overlapping contributing factors that include: 1) the lack of professional development (Heck, Weiss, & Pasley, 2011; Marrongelle, Sztajn, & Smith, 2013), 2) lack of confidence in content knowledge (Love & Wells, 2018), and 3) lack of understanding of the engineering education standards (Hoepfl, 2016). Further, teachers play a key role in perpetuating or challenging dominant narratives (Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 1995). The canonical narrative on engineering is that it is fundamentally a White, male, middle class enterprise (Cech, 2013), borne out in the continued underrepresentation of engineers of color. For example, data from the engineering undergraduate enrollment in 2016 showed that only 21.4% of students are female, with African American females making up just 1.3% (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, 2016). Thus, considering how to promote equity in engineering in K‐12 education is urgent and necessary. In this study in a 7th grade classroom at a Title 1 school with a Black woman teacher, Ms. B, and 100% students of color, we ask: In what ways do does an engineering for sustainable communities (EfSC) curriculum that is co-designed with families, support students’ simultaneous development of engineering and STEM epistemic knowledge and their rightful presence in STEM? How did the relationship dynamics (as related to power, expertise, and respect) shift between students and teacher and what were the impact of these power dynamic shifts to the process and outcomes of students’ engineering learning experiences? We took a research-practice-partnership (Welsh, 2021) approach in our study where families, Ms. B and researchers co-designed the engineering curriculum that was then enacted in the Ms. B’s classrooms for 4.5 weeks. We held three, 90-minute family-teacher-researcher RPP sessions that bookended the curriculum implementation, with one RPP session in the middle of the enactment to facilitate dialogue with families and incorporate their feedback. We are guided by the Rightful Presence for justice-oriented teaching and learning framework (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2020) and data was analyzed via a grounded theory approach (McCall & Edwards, 2021). Data sources included fieldnotes, interviews, audio recordings, and student/family artifacts from both classroom and RPP meetings. Findings include: 1) A hyper-local, sustainable communities culture characterized by familial ties, community concerns and authentic engineering prototypes to address community concerns is integral toward students seeding a rightful presence in K12 engineering; 2) Teacher Ms. B was the linchpin to the emergence of this culture. We elaborate on the nature of the hyper local EfSC culture in the activities students undertook and discuss the implications for justice-oriented K12 engineering education.