Engineering Education and the Elementary Multilingual Classroom

Our project focuses on teaching elementary school teachers of multilingual classrooms the engineering design process. The second picture is from the summer professional learning community last summer. The student researcher on the project would help design, facilitate, and collect data on this professional learning community.

Learn about and contribute to a research project on engineering in the elementary school multilingual classroom. 

Project is Not Currently Available

This project has reached full capacity for the current term. Please check back next semester for updates.

Project description

This National Science Foundation project works with local elementary school teachers, who teach students designated as English learners (i.e., emergent bilinguals). The project aims to facilitate teachers’ knowledge and understandings of how to teach engineering and also to create a sustained professional development model for teachers of emerging multilingual students. As we develop and iterate on this model, we are collecting research data on how teachers learn how to teach engineering using the concept of translanguaging. Translanguaging is using all linguistic resources an individual has in any language that a student brings to the classroom. In this case, we are helping teachers figure out how to invite their students, particularly those who are multilingual, to use all these resources as students engage in engineering design. The project works with teachers from two local school districts. This summer we will increase our work from three teachers to nine teachers.

Project outcome

The student will be a member of the NSF funded research team as a knowledge generator and author. We aim for the student to learn about the fiends of education and engineering education research, analyze research data, facilitate professional development activities for teachers, and contribute to research papers. We aim for the student to draft a conference paper during the summer to submit to the American Society of Engineering Education research in September 2024. 

Project details

Timing, eligibility and other details
Length of commitment About a semester; 3-5 months
Start time Summer (May/June) 
In-person, remote, or hybrid? In-Person Project 
Level of collaboration Small group project (2-3 students) 
Benefits Stipend 
Who is eligible All undergraduate students who have knowledge about engineering and  coursework including some basic engineering courses or science, math or programming courses; relevant work from high school such as robotics club or Project Lead the Way, etc. can be included as well; relevant experiences also include human subject research in psychology or teaching experience 

Core partners

  • Dr. Mary McVee, Graduate School of Education
  • Duncan Mullins, Graduate Student, Department of Engineering Education
  • Sweet Home School District
  • Amherst School District 

Project mentor

Jessica Swenson

Assistant Professor

Engineering Education

Phone: (716) 645-3927

Email: jswenson@buffalo.edu

Start the project

  1. Email the project mentor using the contact information above to express your interest and get approval to work on the project. (Here are helpful tips on how to contact a project mentor.)
  2. After you receive approval from the mentor to start this project, click the button to start the digital badge. (Learn more about ELN's digital badge options.) 
Start the Digital Badge

Preparation activities

Once you begin the digital badge series, you will have access to all the necessary activities and instructions. Your mentor has indicated they would like you to also complete the specific preparation activities below. Please reference this when you get to Step 2 of the Preparation Phase. 

Preparation for project participation will include reading articles about engineering in the elementary school, teacher professional development, studies of multilingual students engineering, and basic texts on translanguaging and language ideologies. 

Keywords

Research, Engineering