- Abby Rhinehart
- Communications Specialist
- Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
- University of Washington, Institute for Science and Math Education
- Philip Bell
- http://education.uw.edu/people/faculty/pbell
- Professor of Learning Sciences & Human Development
- Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
- University of Washington, Institute for Science and Math Education
- Veronica Cassone McGowan
- Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
- University of Washington, Institute for Science and Math Education
- Marcia Ventura
- Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
- Seattle Public Schools
Choice
Research+Practice Collaboratory
NSF Awards: 1626365
2016 (see original presentation & discussion)
Grades K-6
Through a partnership between learning scientists at the University of Washington and local school districts, young learners are getting the opportunity to engage with engineering design in ways that are culturally and personally relevant.
Researchers at the UW Institute for Science and Math Education and district staff and educators from Seattle and Renton school districts are collaborating in a research-practice partnership as they develop their curriculum to support the new education vision articulated in the NRC Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).
This work is done as part of the Research + Practice Collaboratory, a NSF-funded project that brings educators and researchers together to develop more equitable innovations for STEM teaching and learning.
The new vision for education and resulting Next Generation Science Standards emphasize that students should participate in the real work of science and engineering, and should participate in engineering in every year of their schooling. In the project featured in this video, these fifth graders participate in the engineering practice of causal loop diagramming, helping them make connections between previous lessons, ideas, and their own lives.
This partnership is part of the Research + Practice Collaboratory (researchandpractice.org), funded by NSF Award #DUE-1238253.
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Marcia Ventura
The connections that students made in this activity were surprising to me as a teacher here. These fifth graders saw engineering as a thread that connected throughout all of the various subjects we had studied throughout the year.-MV
Jorge Solis
Assistant professor
Great examples of how to get children to notice engineering design elements in everyday life. Could you share a few more examples uncovered through these conversations?
Marcia Ventura
If you start from the premise of the engineering triangle, than really so much of what we do in life is engineering. The kids caught up to that very quickly. They are constantly given opportunities to solve problems that have criteria and constraints, and they work to develop solutions and optimize them. For example: last fall several countries in western Africa were dealing with the epidemic of Ebola. Students soon began thinking of how doctors and health care workers could prevent getting the disease themselves. They began to work on models about this very idea.
Jorge Solis
Assistant professor
Great thanks Marcia. It makes sense that children would grapple with local ecological related matters. Any final tips you would give classroom teachers ?
Philip Bell
Professor of Learning Sciences & Human Development
In case people are interested in learning more about how Marcia was engaging students in engineering projects in support of science learning, here are a few resources:
Story: Fifth-Grade Rocket Scientists
http://researchandpractice.org/fifth-grade-rock...
Curriculum Unit & Classroom Video
https://www.teachingchannel.org/cubesat-enginee...
Other Engineering Curriculum Units & Classroom Video
https://www.teachingchannel.org/engineering-cur...
Michel DeGraff
Professor
What a great idea to have students, very early on, “engage with engineering design in ways that are culturally and personally relevant.” Can you say more about the cultural relevance of some of these engineering-design projects?
Philip Bell
Professor of Learning Sciences & Human Development
We work from the perspective highlighted in the NRC Framework for K-12 Science Education that all STEM learning is a cultural accomplishment: http://www.nap.edu/read/13165/chapter/16#283
It is also helpful that the Framework also defines engineering broadly as: “any engagement in a systematic practice of design to achieve solutions to particular human problems.” (NRC, 2012, p. 46).
This means that all communities have a history and current practice of engaging in design with respect to their cultural practices. This can include youth design knowledge developed through engagement with Minecraft or physical building block systems, how families engage in the systematic design of community gardens, how families engage in textile / crafting design work, and professional design work in urban planning, architecture, or teaching (which is a design-focused profession!). It casts a broad net of design-related practice to leverage in the classroom. I’ll let my collaborators chime in with other examples.
Veronica Cassone McGowan
In addition, Marcia used students everyday experiences to ground all of our engineering design projects. Rather than foregrounding science content knowledge at the start of a design project, she had students reflect on everyday connections to the design task. This took many forms from whole and small group reflections and journal entries to self-documentation- where students took home digital cameras and shared pictures of engineering design solutions from their communities as part of the problem-solving process.
Marcelo Worsley
Assistant Professor
I liked the line of inquiry that has students think about engineering in their everyday lives. Related to this, have you noticed any changes in how students define what it means to be an engineer or in their career aspirations?
Veronica Cassone McGowan
We’re still processing the interview data from last year, but our early findings suggest that broadening what counts as engineering helped students locate their everyday activities within engineering, and also apply engineering problem solving methods to their everyday lives in new ways. Early on students often connected engineering to making things and building things, which connected to areas of play and fixing things in their everyday lives. As the year progressed, students started seeing engineering design as an approach to problem solving rather than a discipline or topic. We found that in addition to broadening what counted as engineering, they also started to take a design-based approach to new tasks. For example, a few students talked about how they approached homework differently over the course of the year- they saw it as a problem to learn from over and over, rather than something to “get right” the first time. Students also started to see connections between engineering, technology, and social issues- I think that was one of the biggest changes in their thinking about engineering over the course of the year.
Veronica Cassone McGowan
The Framework and NGSS highlight two aspects of engineering design learning. First that students understand that engineering, technology, and science are interdependent, and second that society guides the adoption of these principles, and their application can impact the natural world. One of our research goals for this year was to broaden what counts as engineering learning to include having students learn ways that infrastructure and our designed world impact social structures. Students are overwhelmingly taught that success, health, etc. are based on individual actions or “grit” in the face of challenges. However, we know that access to resources is not equally distributed and that these inequities have huge impacts on an individual’s opportunities and health. One of the biggest connections that surfaced during this year of instruction was that between infrastructure/ engineering, clean water, poverty, and health.
Michel DeGraff
Professor
What an insightful exchange! Thank you for these answers (and for Marcelo’s question too!). I particularly like the connections being made between engineering and social issues and student’s everyday lives. This is certainly one nice way to bridge the traditional dichotomy between STEM and the Humanities.
In this vein, perhaps the next question has to do with how the students’ engineering projects can feed into, and be fed by, the sort of civic participation that can actually change decisions being made about “clean water, poverty, and health” (think of Flint, for example).
I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. I am all the more interested that I recently participated in a Forum on exactly that question—the relationship between STEM and political participation, which I am now sharing with as many STEM and Humanities colleagues as I can (sorry…) http://bostonreview.net/forum/danielle-allen-wh...
Veronica Cassone McGowan
Great article- thank you for posting! I totally agree that civic and political engagement are ideal and natural extensions to this type of activity. In particular engaging students in engineering habits of mind such as synthesis and systems thinking can enable them to make well-informed decisions about where to orient their civic activities. For example, in this lesson surface connections between infrastructure, disease, and engineering easily emerged for students. However, it wasn’t until they engaged in more discussion and critical thinking w/ the teacher’s support that connections to poverty, race and social inequities surfaced at the base of the more obvious issues. Ideally, I hope that STEM education will be oriented not just towards producing scientists and engineers for economic reasons, but towards producing technologically literate citizens who can critically engage in our increasingly technological society.
Michel DeGraff
Professor
Glad you like the Forum on “What is education for?” And your answer and the projects you describe show exactly why the STEM-vs-Humanities dichotomy is only apparent. Once we do STEM and the Humanities in the right way, then the two nicely complement each other and lead to better citizens that can more critically and productively engage with our world—exactly as you say.
Perhaps this is yet another aspect of your project to drum up, especially as we consider the disasters that we’re flirting with in so many dimensions of today’s world, due to too much science with too little critical thinking and activism—-or too much critical thinking and activism with too little science.
Good luck with next steps!
Jean Ryoo
Great video! I love how new learning in engineering is rooted in the skills and knowledge students are bringing into the classroom. And what a great note to end on, Marcia: seeing students as partners in the learning space!
Kerri Wingert
I’m really enjoying the discussion around the video here. As a grad researcher on this project, I’d like to add that cultural relevance: 1) academic achievement 2) cultural connection, and 3) critical awareness are at the heart of what our projects try to pull off. The students in this video are thinking HARD about how they can use scientific knowledge and practices to make their world a better place despite unequal sharing of resources.
Dawn O'Connor
The view of students as seen as knowledgable and creating engineering focus that is meaningful to the students. I agree with Michel DeGraff’s comment and the importance of engineering and social issues.
Further posting is closed as the event has ended.