Knowledge to empathy: Shifting epistemological frames in an engineering course for preservice elementary teachers

Elementary teacher preparation commonly includes relatively few science and mathematics courses, and rarely do these have an emphasis on engineering (NRC, 2009). In this paper, we analyze data collected in an introductory engineering course for educators, taught during the Spring 2019 term. The participants are 23 preservice teachers (PSTs). We examine the changing epistemological frames (Hammer, Elby, Scherr, & Redish, 2005) through which students view their engineering work and describe how the PSTs talked and wrote about the relationships among engineering and their future practice as elementary and early childhood educators. Across the course, we see development from naïve notions of engineering's importance as “hands-on” and engaging to more robust epistemologies about engineering as design and teaching engineering as creating productive contexts for students' design processes. We focus on two students' accounts of their own experiences of the engineering design process as centrally relevant to their pedagogical practice with elementary students.