Characterizing engineering outreach educators' talk moves: An exploratory framework

Abstract

Background: Despite the prevalence and potential of K-12 engineering outreach programs, the moment-to-moment dynamics of outreach educators' facilitation of engineering learning experiences are understudied. There is a need to identify outreach educators' teaching moves and to explore the implications of these moves. Purpose/Hypothesis: We offer a preliminary framework for characterizing engineering outreach educators' teaching moves in relation to principles of ambitious instruction. This study describes outreach educators' teaching moves and identifies learning opportunities afforded by these moves.Design/Method: Through discourse analysis of video recordings of a university-led engineering outreach program, we identified teaching moves of novice engineering outreach educators in interaction with elementary student design teams. We considered 18 outreach educators' teaching moves through a lens of ambitious instruction.Results: In small group interactions, outreach educators used ambitious, conservative, and inclusive teaching moves. These novice educators utilized talk moves that centered students' ideas and agency. Ambitious moves included two novel teaching moves: design check-ins and revoicing tangible manifestations of students' ideas. Ambitious moves offered students opportunities to engage in engineering design. Conservative moves provided opportunities for students to make technical and affective progress, and to experience engineering norms.Conclusions: Our work is formative in describing engineering outreach educators' teaching moves and points to outreach educators' capability in using ambitious moves. Ambitious engineering instruction may be a useful framework for designing engineering outreach to support students' participation and progress in engineering design. Additionally, conservative teaching moves, typically considered constraining, may support productive student affect and engagement in engineering design.

Problem-Based Teaching: An Exploratory Analysis of Discourse Methods of Peer Facilitators in a Summer Engineering Bridge Program

“…A growing body of literature has sought to characterize and analyze the discourse between students and their instructors [11][12][13][19][20][21]. Though much of the related literature focuses on students and teachers more broadly, this research was motivated by trying to understand the interactions specifically between undergraduate engineering students and their peer facilitators.…”

“…Our understanding of how classroom discourse emerges in engineering environments remains limited. For example, most existing research has focused on teacher-student interaction [19,20] and may, therefore, be limited in explaining the plethora of ways discourse can occur in an engineering classroom. For this reason, our study aimed to (a) understand the types of discourse methods peer facilitators use when introducing problem solving for gateway-level chemical engineering courses during a summer bridge program and (b) understand how students believed that their academic experiences were impacted by peer facilitators' actions.…”

“…Our work is motivated and shaped by [19]'s preliminary framework for characterizing engineering outreach educators' teaching moves, which builds from [24]'s taxonomy of "talk moves." Ref.…”

“…Ref. [19] previously used this protocol to make sense of video recordings of a university-led engineering outreach program led by novice engineering outreach educators. To that end, because peer facilitators were novice engineering educators, we found this framework useful for our discourse analysis procedures described below.…”

“…Table 3 describes the discourse patterns (i.e., ambitious, conservative, and inclusive) used for our observation protocol. The complete codebook used to describe the subcategory within each discourse pattern further is provided in the Appendix A in Table A1 [19,24].…”