Collaborative Research: From Stories to Solutions: Engaging Latinx Families as Design Partners to Advance Equitable Informal Engineering Learning Opportunities for Young Children

Many point to the potentially transformative role early engineering education can play in broadening participation in STEM among individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse communities. Moreover, this idea has driven the dramatic expansion of tinkering and making spaces and programs that provide engineering learning opportunities for children and their families in the early years. To fully unlock the promise of these kinds of early learning opportunities for advancing equity in engineering, however, it is necessary to do more than increase access. This project addresses the further need to understand how to design these engineering activities and programs to connect with and build upon cultural and familial strengths and practices for supporting children's learning. The project takes as a starting point that many families, and particularly those from cultural communities with rich oral storytelling traditions such as families of Latin American heritages, rely frequently on oral storytelling to communicate knowledge to young children. The project focuses on how Latinx families' everyday practices around engineering and oral storytelling can form the basis for the design of new engineering learning opportunities that recognize and value the assets of individuals and communities. An emphasis on why and how oral storytelling can underpin promising engineering educational practices is in keeping with efforts to engage cultural and familial resources for STEM learning, as well as work in developmental psychology and learning sciences demonstrating that oral stories offer powerful mechanisms for constructing knowledge and making memorable learning. Sharing stories in the context of engineering activities may also foster a sense of belonging, for example, by highlighting the human side of engineering and how it can help others and make things better.

The project reflects a collaboration among community leaders at Palenque LSNA, educators at Chicago Children's Museum (CCM), and researchers at Loyola University Chicago. With a community-engaged process and design-based research methods, 90 Latinx caregivers and their 5- to 8-year-old children will participate as design partners to create playful, hands-on early engineering activities that are relatable and meaningful. Palenque and CCM facilitators will explore strategies for centering oral storytelling as a potentially powerful tool for empowering family design partners. In turn, the resulting activities from the co-design sessions will form community-based informal engineering programs offered to more than 100 community members annually, and during summertime family programming at the museum when the number of visitors can exceed 200 per day. In the community- and museum-based programs, the project will research whether and to what extent the co-designed programs impact family engineering learning in community- and museum-based settings. Additionally, the project will identify practices for effectively sharing the co-design process and first-person voices of family co-design partners, and study how doing so might impact the engineering engagement and stories of connection and belonging expressed by other families participating in the programs. The project will yield a design narrative and a toolkit of resources reflecting what is learned about co-creating engineering learning opportunities for and with community members in ways that reflect families' cultural resources and everyday practices. The project will also contribute practices that support other families in community- and museum-based programs to connect their own stories to hands-on engineering activities in ways that can advance engineering engagement and expressions of belonging. The work will provide robust training and professional development opportunities across the three-way institutional partnership. Practice resources and other products of the work will be created collaboratively and disseminated broadly with contributions of all involved acknowledged.