I understand their frustrations a little bit better. - Elementary teachers' affective stances in engineering in an online learning program (FUNDAMENTAL)

Abstract

Teacher preparation in engineering is a focus for research and practice discussions as engineering becomes more ubiquitous in K-12 (e.g., [1], [2]). A range of work has tackled teacher preparation with respect to engineering content, practices and pedagogy. While standards have emerged [3], teacher preparation in engineering education is still a nascent and dynamic area of study. We are particularly interested in the teachers' own understanding of engineering design practices. Within teacher education, research has attended to characterizations of K-12 teachers' stances toward engineering design within their classroom and how teachers' stances impact students' experiences [4][5]. In our own work, we saw that teachers, who had been prepared solely by enacting the same student activities as they would use in their classroom, often enacted engineering design as a linear process [6]. However, to date there has been little focus on understanding which professional development approaches are particularly impactful for shifting teacher practices and ideas about engineering. If we look within the broader field of engineering education, there has been significant discussion about what informed engineering designers do (e.g., [7]-[9]) with respect to engineering design practices. Studies have correlated sophistication in design practice to experience in doing engineering [8], [9], suggesting that university-based design projects and real world challenges support engineering students and professionals in transforming their understanding and use of engineering practices. Based on current research and our own work, we hypothesized that for teachers, as adults with significant experience with mechanisms and materials, practices of engineering design might seem more linear because individual elements may not be explicitly necessary for them to complete a challenge. For example, when building a windmill from craft materials, drawing before making may serve little purpose for teachers, as they have seen windmills in different contexts. Likewise, they might not need to test which shapes are sturdy before deciding on a configuration for a bridge, as they have prior experience with triangles or structural building challenges. In another example, teachers might not need to do multiple iterations of prototyping a chair for a teddy bear, as they can quickly and easily envision a functional solution. Following this reasoning, we conjectured that, to understand the complexities and nuance of engineering design, teachers need to be engaged in doing engineering that challenged them as adults, similar to the types of experiences that have been proposed to shift practice for undergraduate engineering students and engineering professionals [8][9]. Shifting practice and understanding through thoughtful experiences that are meaningful to the learners has been discussed within research in science education (e.g., [10]). Meaningfulness grounds what happens in instruction with the learner's sensemaking in both the professional disciplinary and classroom context and foregrounds how the learner experiences the activity. We take this up within engineering to mean that participants experience the need for engineering practices and tools. In contrast to when teachers are enacting a challenge that their young students are doing that might not necessitate planning or iteration - we propose that teachers engage in engineering activities that challenge them as adults. We call this approach meaningful engineering. We explored our conjecture related to meaningful engineering within the Teacher Engineering Education Program (TEEP), our online teacher certification program in engineering. TEEP is an 18-month program where participants take two engineering content courses and two engineering pedagogy courses. The TEEP program separated content and pedagogy courses so that educators could experience learning engineering as adults, independent of their role as teachers. The graduate level TEEP content courses use LEGO robotics materials to engage teachers in the doing of engineering. In this paper we focus on elementary teacher participants engaged in learning paradigms for programming (Sense-Think-Act) and structures for coding with sensors. The course addressed content related to particular mechanical mechanisms (gears, pulleys, motors) and higher-level engineering design (design process models, tools for evaluating solutions, failure analysis). Throughout the semester, participants do weekly readings on engineering and engage in hands-on design challenges (described in Appendix A). The course culminated with a final project that tasks participants to solve the problem of feeding Agnes's fish while she is away. Figure 1 is an excerpt from the open-ended design brief students receive. The project is scaffolded (Figure 2) with design deliverables (drawings, first prototypes and final prototypes) over the final weeks of the course.