Faculty/Staff Detail

Katie Silvestri, Literacy Department, co-authored an article about engineering and communicative literacies with K-12 students recently published in the Journal for Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER). Co-authors are Michelle Jordan of the University of Arizona, Patricia Paugh at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Mary McVee at the University at Buffalo SUNY, and Diane Schallert at the University of Texas - Austin.

The article is a state-of-the-art literature review focused on findings of 33 research articles informed by qualitative and quantitative data to foreground communicative literacies within engineering design teams at the pre-college level. The selected studies clustered under five overarching themes pertaining to: (a) engineering disciplinary communicative literacies in practice; (b) matters of access with populations underrepresented in engineering; (c) learning STEM content through engineering design; (d) affective responses to uncertainty and risk in engineering design; and (e) evaluating the quality of collaboration. With respect to the themes, the authors discuss possibilities of using literacy frameworks to deepen theoretical and methodological insights into the study of phenomena related to within-group communicative literacies in K-12 engineering spaces.