BOARD # 344: Community Tech Press: Sixth-grade youth expanding engineering through critical multilingual journalism (DRK-12)
- Conference
- Location
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Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Publication Date
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June 22, 2025
- Start Date
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June 22, 2025
- End Date
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August 15, 2025
- Conference Session
- Tagged Topics
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Diversity and NSF Grantees Poster Session
- Page Count
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6
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/55713
Paper Authors
Chelsea Joy Andrews
Tufts University
orcid.org/0000-0002-9017-595X
Chelsea Andrews is a Research Assistant Professor at Tufts University, at the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO).
Kristen B Wendell Tufts University
Kristen Wendell is Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Education at Tufts University. Her research efforts at at the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach focus on supporting discourse and design practices of engineering learners from all backgrounds and at all levels.
Greses Perez P.E.
Tufts University
orcid.org/0000-0003-4737-0888
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.
Fatima Rahman Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach
L. Clara Mabour
Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach
orcid.org/0009-0008-0804-7176
Clara Mabour is a first year STEM Education Ph.D currently researching hip hop as a culturally sustaining method for teaching STEM. She has a bachelor's in environmental science from the University of Florida. Prior to starting her studies at Tufts, Clara taught high school science and research and she ran STEM and invention focused afterschool programs and summer camps in South Florida. Her experience as a Haitian immigrant in South Florida have shaped her teaching approaches research interests. Clara’s research interests focus on the intersection of culture, learner agency, materials, and problem solving in informal and formal K-12 STEM learning spaces.
Abstract
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.
Andrews, C. J., & Wendell, K. B., & Perez, G., & Rahman, F., & Mabour, L. C. (2025, June), BOARD # 344: Community Tech Press: Sixth-grade youth expanding engineering through critical multilingual journalism (DRK-12) Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada . https://peer.asee.org/55713
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