Teachers’ Noticing Engineering In Everyday Objects And Processes

Engineers have been so successful at seamlessly integrating their achievements into the fabric of our daily lives that we often overlook how they influence our lives. Pearson and Young 1 discuss this paradox to emphasize the importance of increasing technological literacy of everyone. Prior studies of people’s (children and adults) perceptions of engineering describe peoples’ ability to notice the visible aspect of engineering created by civil (buildings, bridges), mechanical (cars, machines) and electrical engineering (electrical energy that runs our machines). An examination of their descriptions of engineering, however, often contains misconceptions. If teachers are part of the solution to develop students’ awareness of engineering, then we need to better understand their abilities to identify engineering within the world and to talk about it with their students. Our study evaluates teachers’ abilities to notice what is engineering in common products that we interact with each day (e.g., milk carton, apple peeler, water filter) and to identify the work of engineers in the field (e.g., environmental). Further we asked teachers to share how they would explain to their students how pictures pre-selected by engineering education researchers relate to engineering. In this paper, we share our coding scheme for teachers’ responses, and we compare their development from preto postparticipation in our summer professional development activities. This method builds on prior studies that use photos as stimulus responses. Unlike other studies, we are systematically exploring specific image types that elicit response to a wide range of engineering products and processes that influence our lives. In addition, we are looking to see how well these methods work to differentiate various disciplines of engineering.