Baltimore , Maryland
June 25, 2023
June 25, 2023
June 28, 2023
Educational Research and Methods Division (ERM)
Diversity
10
10.18260/1-2--43711
https://peer.asee.org/43711
186
Scott Pattison, PhD, is a social scientist who has been studying and supporting STEM education and learning since 2003, as an educator, program and exhibit developer, evaluator, and researcher. His current work focuses on engagement, learning, and interest and identity development in free-choice and out-of-school environments, including museums, community-based organizations, and everyday settings. Dr. Pattison specializes in using qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the processes and mechanisms of learning in naturalistic settings. He has partnered with numerous educational and community organizations across the country to support learning for diverse communities.
Gina Navoa Svarovsky is an Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Notre Dame's Center for STEM Education and the College of Engineering. She has studied how young people learn engineering for over two decades.
Catherine Wagner is a research staff member at the Center for STEM Education at the University of Notre Dame. She earned her Master of Education degree from Notre Dame in 2019 while teaching middle school science. She has collaborated with faculty in the Center for STEM on engineering research for several years, most recently leading an undergraduate research lab on early childhood engineering research. In the Center, she also supports other research projects on science pedagogy.
Over the last several decades, there are an increasing number of programs designed to engage young children and their families in engineering design. To ensure that these efforts are successful, it is critical that programs directly connect with and support the prior interests and experiences of children and their families. Unfortunately, the voices and perspectives of youth and families participating in these programs have been notably absent from the engineering education literature, especially for individuals from historically marginalized communities. Equity scholars in the engineering education field have noted how educators and researchers have struggled to rethink the historically colonialist and hegemonic perspectives that have dominated the field and continue to serve as central barriers to diversifying engineering careers. In this ongoing study, we are working to elevate the voices of parents and young children from low-income Spanish- and English-speaking families in our community and better understand the ways that they connect engineering to their own interests, goals, and values. The study is part of an ongoing design-based implementation research project, in partnership with our local Head Start program, designed to develop engineering programs for preschool-aged children and their families and simultaneously study how these experiences shape families’ long-term interests related to engineering. Through longitudinal, qualitative data collection and analysis, we are developing case studies of family experiences with the program and they ways that both children and adults subsequently continue to think about and engage with engineering 1 to 2 years after the program ends.
Pattison, S. A., & Ramos-Montañez, S., & López Burgos, V., & Svarovsky, G. N., & Wagner, C., & Douglass, A., & Allen, J. (2023, June), Family Voices: Learning from Families with Preschool-Age Children from Historically Marginalized Communities to Expand our Vision of Engineering Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43711
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