Supporting Teacher Visioning of Justice-Oriented Engineering in the Middle Grades

Abstract

ABSTRACT There are well-documented justice-related issues in engineering education. How do teachers begin to develop a way of seeing forward in their teaching, both in how they understand their role and their hoped-for outcomes for students, in ways that bridge the goals of justice with required engineering disciplinary expectations? In this manuscript, we focus on how teachers envision teaching engineering in ways that attend to the sociopoliticaldimensions of STEM teaching and learning. Through participatory social design research, we ask: (1) How do two middle school science teachers’ vision of what justice-oriented engineering for sustainable communities (EfSC) is and entails, develop across sustained professional development (PD) and classroom enactment of an EfSC curriculum? (2) What is the relationship between teachers’ processes of visioning and student opportunities for consequential learning? Findings suggest that teachers’ visioning of justice-oriented engineering teaching take shape as they started to see themselves as being in relationship to engineering and community, making others’ experiences and their own important aspects of learning. Further, this work of visioning is filled with tension and contradiction. In learning alongside their students about how powered relationalities shape opportunities to learn, teachers had to see themselves inside the process. Implications are discussed.