Exploring the association between STEM-related family habitus and engineering identities of high school summer campers

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) outreach activities are popular approaches to K-12 informal STEM learning which seek to address STEM education inequities. However, in Canada, there is limited literature exploring the combinations of barriers and privileges that impact youths’ access to informal STEM education. To understand youths’ affective engagement in STEM education, as impacted by factors of habitus and capital, constructs such as identity are being frequently explored, with pilot work done by our lab. Our pilot work suggests paid summer outreach camps affiliated with postsecondary institutions may draw in youth from families with ‘high’ socioeconomic status and STEM habitus. Additionally, youth tend to come into the camps with ‘high’ pre-existing engineering identity. These initial findings prompted us to explore the relation between youths’ engineering identities and their perceived family STEM habitus and capital. Through a survey of high school students in an outreach engineering camp we measured youth’s engineering identity and family STEM habitus and capital. Our results indicate a positive relationship between students’ perceived family STEM habitus and their engineering identity. Additionally, we found that students with higher family STEM capital showed higher engineering identity. This work offers valuable insight for outreach educators to understand the privilege perpetuated by strong family STEM environments and develop strategies to fill the resource gaps for students with lower STEM-related family habitus and capital.