Expanding Sixth-Grade Youth's Understanding of Engineering Through Critical Multilingual Journalism

This four-year project will develop, enact, and study a critical climate technology journalism curriculum to support multilingual sixth grade students’ knowledge and practices in engineering. Synthesizing expertise in climate technology, communication, and multilingual education, the project will engage students in investigating, designing, and communicating critical engineering knowledge about community-based technological systems. Students will learn engineering as they construct and convey messages about climate technology in their community for an audience of family members, community groups, and civic leaders. While many existing middle-school engineering curricula emphasize creating an optimal solution to an engineering design problem for a client or user, this project takes a civic-oriented approach, where students engage in engineering to inform multilingual audiences about a climate technology affecting their local communities. An important characteristic of the urban school district partnering on this project is that students speak more than 50 languages and nearly 50% speak a language at home that differs from that of the dominant society. Given this, professional development workshops will support teacher learning to enact the curriculum so that it engages multilingual youth's participation in engineering design practices in culturally meaningful ways.

Over the course of three design-based research cycles with the proposed curriculum unit, the team will generate evidence-based theory about how a critical technology journalism approach influences engineering learning among sixth-grade youth, including students from multilingual families. The project aims to answer three research questions: (1) What is the evolution of student learning outcomes, including their 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) What community resources (language and culture, contexts) do students draw on as they participate in the curriculum?; and (3) What is the influence of curriculum resources and teacher facilitation moves on student learning outcomes? To answer these questions, the research team will use qualitative methods that include video recordings of lesson enactments and interviewing teachers and students. The team will analyze these data using techniques from interaction analysis and discourse analysis. Beyond the seven teachers and 920 students directly engaging in the curriculum during the four-year project, the project's Community Tech Press website will share the finalized curriculum unit and its supporting materials with the broader community. This dissemination intends to enable teachers across the country to adapt this approach to create locally-relevant curriculum for their multilingual students.