Epistemological framing and novice elementary teachers' approaches to learning and teaching engineering design

Abstract

As engineering learning experiences increasingly begin in elementary school, elementary teacher preparation programs are an important site for the study of teacher development in engineering education. In this article, we argue that the stances that novice teachers adopt toward engineering learning and knowledge are consequential for the opportunities they create for students. We present a comparative case study examining the epistemological framing dynamics of two novice urban teachers, Ana and Ben, as they learned and taught engineering design during a four‐week institute for new elementary teachers. Although the two teachers had very similar teacher preparation backgrounds, they interpreted the purposes of engineering design learning and teaching in meaningfully different ways. During her own engineering sessions, Ana took up the goal not only of meeting the needs of the client but also of making scientific sense of artifacts that might meet those needs. When facilitating students' engineering, she prioritized their building knowledge collaboratively about how things work. By contrast, when Ben worked on his own engineering, he took up the goal of delivering a product. When teaching engineering to students, he offered them constrained prototyping tasks to serve as hands‐on contexts for reviewing scientific explanations. These findings call for teacher educators to support teachers' framing of engineering design as a knowledge building enterprise through explicit conversations about epistemology, apprenticeship in sense‐making strategies, and tasks intentionally designed to encourage reasoning about design artifacts.

A systematic review of argumentation related to the engineering‐designed world

“…These discipline‐specific processes for building and communicating knowledge have been termed epistemic practices (Cunningham & Kelly, ; Sandoval & Reiser, ). Although many secondary contexts for knowledge production (Bernstein, ) do not have dedicated instructional blocks for the discipline of engineering, scholars (e.g., Wendell, Swenson, & Dalvi, ) have demonstrated that the epistemic practices of one discipline can be enacted at a task level even in instructional settings designated for other disciplines. For example, the epistemic practices of engineering can be demonstrated through individual engineering design tasks or argumentative tasks within the context of instructional blocks designated for other subjects such as science, literacy, or technology education (e.g., Wilson‐Lopez, Gregory, & Larsen, ; Wilson‐Lopez & Minichiello, ).…”

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

“…The widespread response of teacher educators to these challenges is to introduce PSTs to the engineering design process (EDP) as the vehicle for learning to teach engineering projects (Aydeniz and Bilican, 2018;Coppola, 2019;Lin and Williams, 2017;Mativo and Park, 2012;Radloff and Capobianco, 2019;Wendell et al 2019;Winarno et al 2020). However, most students starting primary teacher-training are unlikely to have had much exposure to engineering design at school (Dalvi et al 2020).…”

“…Technology students may have a narrow conception of the design process, not perceiving it to be an iterative process that encourages reflection on failure and learning from mistakes (McRobbie et al 2000), so they skip the re-design stage or simply frame the project as building a product rather than being a process (Coppola, 2019;Wendell et al 2019).…”

“…Professional development programmes for teachers, both in-service and pre-service, are addressing these challenges in innovative and creative ways (Mesutoglu and Baran, 2020). Nevertheless, it has been suggested that more attention should be paid to researching the experiences of pre-service primary teachers (Clark and Andrews, 2010;Rinke et al 2016;Shernoff et al 2017;Wendell et al 2019). Consequently, the overall aim of this case study was to explore, in the context of the new narrative for engineering education noted above, how a specific approach to understanding engineering as engineering habits of mind (EHoM), reinforced through authentic engagement with engineers, might support primary pre-service teachers (PST) to develop greater confidence to embed engineering themes into their teaching.…”

Transformations in Elementary Teachers' Pedagogical Reasoning: Studying Teacher Learning in an Online Graduate Program in Engineering Education

“…The field has started to examine these aspects of engineering pedagogy, in terms of practices and moves [3], [21]- [23]. There have been accompanying efforts to characterize pedagogical content knowledge in engineering [6], [24], [25] and how teachers' own disciplinary experiences can influence their goals for teaching [26]. Our prior work has emphasized the importance of pedagogical responsiveness, looking at what teachers with varying degrees of experience teaching engineering notice in students' thinking and how they respond [2], [27].…”