Challenges encountered by elementary education major students when learning engineering

Developing pre-service primary teachers’ understanding of engineering through engineering habits of mind and engagement with engineers

“…Strategies used by teacher educators to expand PSTs' understanding of engineering often include facilitating contact between PSTs and engineers and introducing design projects using the EDP but several challenges in implementing these approaches were revealed in the literature. We found, like other studies (for example, Bir et al 2017;Coppola, 2019;Dalvi et al 2020), that our PSTs lacked experience of the world of engineering but that even relatively short contact with practising engineers with different roles and career trajectories deepened their understanding of the nature of engineering and the ways in which EHoM are used to underpin engineering thinking in the real-world. This will hopefully increase PSTs' confidence to invite engineers into their classrooms after they graduate to model engineering practices to children (MacGregor and White, 2016).…”

“…The inclusion of teaching practice in a school, for which PSTs plan and teach lessons incorporating EHoM, is confirmed as a critical element in increasing their understanding of and building their engagement with EHoM (Bir et al 2017;Mesutoglu and Baran, 2020). However, the organisation to make this happen, particularly as it involved students preparing to teach three different subjects, does require significant determination from education tutors, since the dispersed nature of university departments can make this sort of cross-subject collaboration challenging (Mativo and Park, 2012;Shernoff et al 2017).…”

“…On all routes, student teachers spend a minimum of 24 weeks in school (DfE, n.d.) Although primary teachers would appear to be in a strong position to teach integrated engineering projects because they normally teach across all areas of the curriculum (Pope, 2019) a frequently cited barrier to doing this is PSTs' lack of content knowledge, not only in engineering but in the actual STEM subjects they are training to teach, such as technology (Avsec and Sajdera, 2019;Bencze, 2010;Lee et al 2020;McRobbie et al 2000), science (Radloff and Capobianco, 2019) and computing (Bell et al 2016). This leaves them feeling unprepared to teach engineering (Bir et al 2017;Coppola, 2019), despite their awareness of its importance (Bir et al 2017;Kurup et al 2019;Margot and Kettler, 2019). They are also hampered by their stereotypical or erroneous views of engineers (Bir et al 2017); a lack of insight into the nature of engineering (Pleasants and Olson, 2019); and their inexperience of authentic contexts in which science and technology knowledge is used (Bencze, 2010).…”

“…This leaves them feeling unprepared to teach engineering (Bir et al 2017;Coppola, 2019), despite their awareness of its importance (Bir et al 2017;Kurup et al 2019;Margot and Kettler, 2019). They are also hampered by their stereotypical or erroneous views of engineers (Bir et al 2017); a lack of insight into the nature of engineering (Pleasants and Olson, 2019); and their inexperience of authentic contexts in which science and technology knowledge is used (Bencze, 2010).…”

“…Uncertainty about what engineering is can result in negative perceptions of engineers and what they do (Bir et al 2017;Pleasants and Olson, 2019), so even brief contact with engineers can expand primary teachers' awareness of the impact of engineering on the world around them and increase their understanding of engineering thinking (Duncan et al 2011;Gibson, 2013). Furthermore, engineers can help to make STEM classroom activities appear relevant to the real-world, build teachers' confidence to discuss engineering themes with pupils and highlight the importance of problem-solving, collaboration and communication skills (Bowen and Shume, 2018;MacGregor and White, 2016).…”