2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The chronic underrepresentation of students of color in engineering education and the profession is well documented. The percentage of Black graduates from engineering degrees remain hovering at 4% (NCES, 2019). This persistent lack of representation of students of color is entangled with the norms and practices of canonical engineering, calling into question the nature of canonical engineering epistemology (Adams et al., 2011; Cech, 2013). At the K12 level with the Next Generation Science Standards, engineering is a core and distinct component of the K12 curriculum (NGSS Lead States, 2013). However, few K-12 teachers have had formal exposure to the concepts and practices of engineering (Anderson & Kullman, 2020) and most do not feel equipped to teach engineering (Hsu et al., 2011). For students of color across K16, cultural dissonance and a lack of community representation are important factors that alienate and marginalize student engagement in engineering education (Cech, 2013; Coley & Thomas, 2023). Emphasizing the personal relevance of engineering to students' everyday experiences has been found to be helpful in increasing student interest in engineering (Guzey et al., 2016; Heddy et al., 2017; Shahali et al., 2016). This can be done through a collaborative effort of engaging in engineering experiences with families, teachers, and students. Boberiene (2013) showed that family engagement improves classroom dynamics and increases teacher expectations, student-teacher relationships, and cultural competence, regardless of student’s age groups. In the K12 context, while parental engagement in school is largely framed as positive (Boonk et al, 2018), school-centric approaches to parental engagement obscure both the barriers minoritized parents face in gaining access to participating in these ways (Paredes-Scribner & Fernandez, 2017) and the rich community wealth that minoritized parents bring to their children’s disciplinary learning (Olivia & Aleman, 2019). In this study, in a 7th grade classroom at a Title 1 school with a Black teacher, Ms. D, and 100% students of color, we engaged in a research-practice-partnership with five youth and families to co-design and enact a 4.5 week-long, engineering for sustainable communities’ curriculum in middle school science. We ask: How is engineering knowledge co-constructed during the enactment of a engineering for sustainable communities (EfSC) curriculum within the classroom and RPP meetings? What are the outcomes of co-constructing knowledge to students’ learning and how they identify with engineering? 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. Guided by the Rightful Presence framework for justice-oriented teaching and learning (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2020), data was collected and 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) Co-construction of authentic engineering knowledge is emergent and contingent on familial relationships and technical and social aspects relevant to engineering design: 2) Familial presence in engineering provides a platform for seeding a student’s rightful presence in engineering education.