Engaging Latine Families as Design Partners to Advance Equitable Informal Engineering Learning Opportunities for Young Children

This NSF-funded project involves community leaders at Palenque LSNA, educators at Chicago Children’s Museum (CCM), and researchers at Loyola University Chicago. Our aim is to advance equity-oriented approaches to the co-creation of early informal engineering learning opportunities for community and museum settings. A total of 90 Latine caregivers and their 5- to 8-year-old children will participate as design partners. Palenque and CCM facilitators will explore strategies for centering oral storytelling as a potentially powerful tool for empowering family design partners to create playful, hands-on early engineering activities that are relatable and meaningful for them. 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 at Palenque’s Community Learning Center, and summertime family programming at CCM’s Tinkering Lab when the number of visitors can exceed 200 per day. In the community- and museum-based programs, we will study 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 contribute much needed strengths-based practices for co-creating informal engineering learning opportunities with and for Latinx families with young children. We will identify 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 also address how a community-engaged approach involving young children and their families can contribute to more inclusive definitions of engineering in informal educational practices. This is important because narrow definitions of what counts as engineering and who engages in engineering can disproportionately discourage children from communities who have historically been, or continue to be excluded, under-served, or underrepresented in STEM. Additionally, the work will provide robust training and professional development opportunities across our three-way partnership, including undergraduate and graduate students at Loyola University Chicago.