Socially Transformative Engineering Pedagogy for a Sustainable Future

As the nation tackles the challenges of energy transition, K-12 education must prepare a future STEM workforce that can not only apply STEM skills but also address reasoning through complex sociotechnical problems involving social justice. Conscientious engineering design can help youth develop these competencies. However, few secondary school programs or STEM curricula focus on promoting students’ reasoning fluency through conscientious engineering design. Aligned with the principles of socially transformative engineering and focused on students of color, this project involves the design and implementation of a novel STEM education curriculum. The curriculum will support the development of secondary students’ abilities to reason through ambiguous and ethical challenges through design projects and to transfer these competencies to everyday life and future workplaces. The project will empower youth as transformative agents with abilities to conscientiously negotiate risks and benefits as they scope and analyze complex problems, generate ideas and solutions, and reason through ethics. The project will contribute to the cultivation of a new generation of STEM professionals who are able to design engineering solutions for environmental sustainability and societal equity. The project’s partnerships with public school leaders, teachers, and informal educators will further support transformative learning over time with the implementation of the curriculum to future cohorts of students. The curricular products of the project will be published on publicly available websites and journals to promote easy access.

The framework for this project integrates three theories—the legitimation code theory, justice-based science education pedagogy, and futures-thinking literacy—to deliver fundamental insights into how secondary school students develop reasoning fluency and STEM knowledge through engagement in socially transformative engineering work. Four key tenets guide the curriculum design work for this project: multicultural ingenuity, ethical integrity, reasoning fluency, and transformative agency. Working with 50 secondary school educators in school contexts that primarily serve students of color, the project involves the design, implementation, and study of a curriculum that will support the development of approximately 600 students’ abilities to reason through ambiguous and ethical challenges through design projects. This project will advance research on transformative agency and reasoning capabilities of minoritized youth in particular as they engage in engineering design. The project has three objectives. First, it will refine curricular resources in alignment with Socially Transformative Engineering Pedagogy and offer professional development with a sociocultural perspective that privileges students’ cultural knowledge and discourse patterns. Second, it will promote futures reasoning and social justice by advancing the capabilities of educational technologies for sustainable infrastructure design using computer-aided design, including but not limited to AI applications such as generative design and personalized learning. And third, it will improve theory on how youth develop reasoning fluency and transformative agency through socially conscientious design. Engineering projects such as designing a self-sustaining microgrid community will foster students' learning and reasoning as they draw on their cultural funds of knowledge and deliberate the consequences of their design choices. Discourse and content analysis methods will be used to study the nature of fluency in student reasoning. Methods such as cluster analysis will be used to identify patterns of variations.