Despite reform efforts to broaden historically underrepresented populations across STEM disciplines, the data continues to highlight gaps of achievement across racial demographics. In an effort to address educational inequity, current reform efforts have touted the implementation of learning progressions as a promising strategy that can produce equality of outcomes across racial groups in STEM. Despite this promising effort, few studies have examined how to integrate practices of equity within learning progressions for groups such as African Americans that have been traditionally excluded from science and STEM. This study argues that an equity oriented learning progression should be responsive to sociohistorical factors of epistemic injustice that dissociated African Americans identities from being producers of knowledge. This study argues that the construction of a learning progression to advance the epistemic participation of African American students is aligned with goals of social justice related to diversifying STEM. The aims of this study explored how African American students progressed toward epistemic agency as STEM learners as a result of identity transformation through the engagement of the epistemic practices of engineering. This study used qualitative methodology to explore how student participants demonstrate epistemic development in their artifacts and discourse when engaging in engineering activities across a learning progression designed to develop epistemic agency. The findings from this study contribute to a broader understanding of how equity-oriented learning progressions can be designed to promote epistemic justice, how sociocultural positionings influence epistemic communities, and how students can become epistemic agents to raise STEM awareness within their local community. Advancing students epistemic practices of engineering and epistemic agency as STEM learners is key to creating meaningful pathways into STEM for students in K-12. / Doctor of Philosophy / National imperatives to broaden the STEM participation of underrepresented groups remains a prominent priority across educational research. Due to marginal effectiveness associated with racialized minorities, researchers continue to explore equity oriented initiatives. In an effort to address educational inequity, current reform efforts have touted the implementation of learning progressions as a promising strategy that can produce equality of outcomes across racial groups in science and STEM. Educational inequity prevents underrepresented populations, such as African Americans, from having the types of educational experiences that position them as significant contributors in STEM and more specifically engineering. This study argues that the construction of a learning progression to advance the epistemic participation and agency of African American students in STEM is a sociohistorical response to a legacy of epistemic injustice. Qualitative methodology was used to explore how African American students progressed toward epistemic agency as STEM learners as a result of identity transformation through the engagement of the epistemic practices of engineering. The findings indicated that the engineering design activities within the curriculum positively influenced students' identity, self-efficacy, and demonstration of epistemic agency across the learning progression. Additionally, the findings indicated the effectiveness of using the epistemic practices of engineering to facilitate the cognitive development of the engineering habits of mind. Lastly, the findings indicated the significance of using the epistemic practices of engineering to reposition African American students' identities as epistemic contributors both within the classroom and within their local community.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/110796 |
| Date | 15 June 2022 |
| Creators | Taylor, Lezly |
| Contributors | Education, Vocational-Technical, Glasson, George E., King, Natalie S., Williams, Thomas O., Kniola, David J. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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