“That is Still STEM”: Appropriating the Engineering Design Process to Challenge Dominant Narratives of Engineering and STEM

Watkins, Jessica

doi:10.1080/07370008.2022.2156512

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The existing literature asserts that the dominant culture and narratives in STEM disciplines prefer individuals who identify as either white, Asian, male, cisgender, or a combination [20][21][22]. As such, individuals from these identity backgrounds are more likely to achieve their desired goals and careers in STEM.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, scholars have challenged the notion of the deficit solely lying with the individual and have provided substantial evidence that many of these challenges are perpetuated by systematic and structural policies, practices, and ideologies interwoven into the fabric of the STEM enterprise [15][16][17][18][19]. Further, scholars have posited that to broaden STEM participation for marginalized groups, we must critically disrupt the dominant STEM culture and narrative rooted in white and male dominance [20][21][22]. There are structural and systematic biases that preferentially encourage students from dominant groups and those who are well-resourced, i.e., in terms of finances, positions of power, and influence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Leveraging Cultural Wealth, Identities and Motivation: How Diverse Intersectional Groups of Low-Income Undergraduate STEM Students Persist in Collegiate STEM Environments

Davis,

Wilson-Kennedy

2023

Education Sciences

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Grounded in a conceptual framework incorporating intersectionality, motivation, self-determination, and self-efficacy, this empirical study investigated how individuals’ identities, mindsets, and resources in educational environments intentionally cultivated to support their decision-making, development, and connections in the science community, can significantly increase the recruitment, persistence, and success of low-income, academically talented science students from diverse backgrounds. Several factors—academic performance in coursework, self-image, self-agency, financial support, and social integration in the science culture—continue to significantly impact student retention and persistence in STEM disciplines. Many of these factors are negatively affected based on a students’ intersecting identities, which can be detrimental to their academic success if not addressed. We found that additional considerations to factor in concerning low-income students from diverse backgrounds that is pertinent to supporting their persistence and success in the postsecondary STEM educational context.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leveraging Cultural Wealth, Identities and Motivation: How Diverse Intersectional Groups of Low-Income Undergraduate STEM Students Persist in Collegiate STEM Environments

Davis,

Wilson-Kennedy

2023

Education Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Rather than proposing a particular activity to address this aspect of teacher learning, we suggest looking for opportunities to engage with dominant discourses within existing activities. For instance, one common approach to support teacher learning is for teachers to engage in and reflect on their own disciplinary activities-which could serve as launching points for conversations about how to challenge narrow conceptions of ability in school (Watkins, 2023). Another common teacher learning activity is to use classroom videos to notice, interpret, and discuss how to respond to student thinking-teacher educators could find opportunities to consider how race, class, and gender intersect with their noticings of disciplinary thinking (Shah & Coles, 2020;van Es et al, 2017).…”

Section: Implications For Teachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Examining interactions between dominant discourses and engineering educational concepts in teachers' pedagogical reasoning

De Lucca,

Watkins,

Swanson

et al. 2023

J of Engineering Edu

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BackgroundEngineering's introduction into K–12 classrooms has been purported to support meaningful and inclusive learning environments. However, teachers must contend with dominant discourses embedded in US schooling that justify inequitable distributions of resources.PurposeDrawing on Gee's notion of discourses, we examine how teachers incorporate language legitimizing socially and culturally constructed values and beliefs. In particular, we focus on the discourse of ability hierarchy—reflecting dominant values of sorting and ranking students based on perceived academic abilities—and the discourse of individual blame—reflecting dominant framings of educational problems as solely the responsibility of individual students or families. We aim to understand how these discourses surface in teachers' reasoning about teaching engineering.MethodWe interviewed 15 teachers enrolled in an online graduate program in engineering education. Utilizing critical discourse analysis, we analyzed how teachers drew on discourses of blame and ability hierarchy when reasoning about problems of practice in engineering.ResultsTeachers drew on engineering education concepts to reinforce dominant discourses (echoing specific language and preserving given roles) as well as to disrupt (utilizing different language or roles that [implicitly] challenge) dominant discourses. Importantly, teachers could also retool discourses of ability hierarchy (arguing for a more equitable distribution of resources but problematically preserving the values of ranking and sorting students).ConclusionsK–12 schooling's sociohistorical context can shape how teachers make sense of engineering in ways that implicate race, gender, disability, and language, suggesting a need to grapple with how discourses from schooling—and engineering culture—maintain marginalizing environments for students.

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Fostering expansive and connective sensemaking with preservice secondary science teachers

Watkins,

De Lucca,

Pao

2023

J Res Sci Teach

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Preservice secondary science teachers often experience science learning in narrow and marginalizing ways in their science preparation. These experiences cause harm, particularly for preservice teachers of color. They also limit the disciplinary resources they can develop for later teaching science in ways that value and sustain their students' ways of knowing and being in the world. Our research explores possibilities for cultivating new spaces for preservice secondary science teachers to engage in science. In a content‐focused education course, we designed for and studied preservice teachers' engagement in expansive and connective sensemaking, incorporating heterogeneity, power, and historicity in pursuits of explanatory accounts of the natural world. In this article, we examined how this course design can support preservice teachers to attune to heterogeneity in ways of knowing in science and to connect to identity and historicity in scientific sensemaking. Our analysis suggests that students' final projects reflected attunements to diverse knowing, communicating, and relating in science and deep connections with their identities and future‐making, yet had fewer connections to sociohistorical narratives and structures. We developed illustrative case studies of four student projects, highlighting the personal, social, and political possibilities of creating space for future educators to imagine more expansive and connective forms of science. This study contributes a novel model for preservice science teacher education to support teacher learning to value and sustain their students' ways of knowing and being in the world.

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“That is Still STEM”: Appropriating the Engineering Design Process to Challenge Dominant Narratives of Engineering and STEM

Cited by 3 publications

References 91 publications

Leveraging Cultural Wealth, Identities and Motivation: How Diverse Intersectional Groups of Low-Income Undergraduate STEM Students Persist in Collegiate STEM Environments

Leveraging Cultural Wealth, Identities and Motivation: How Diverse Intersectional Groups of Low-Income Undergraduate STEM Students Persist in Collegiate STEM Environments

Examining interactions between dominant discourses and engineering educational concepts in teachers' pedagogical reasoning

Fostering expansive and connective sensemaking with preservice secondary science teachers

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