Language as Technology: Middle-School Students’ Production of Engineering Media for Community Audiences

Most students in the United States experience engineering education as primarily technical knowledge and communication in English-dominant settings. Such engineering education is at odds with the sociotechnical realities of engineers who collaborate with and communicate their work to audiences of various backgrounds, from peers to communities and other stakeholders. Yet assimilated into the dominant societal language and the culture of engineering, students are under the impression they must compartmentalize their own ways of speaking and knowing. This design-based research study examines how language functions as technology in engineering communication systems, particularly among sixth-grade students’ engineering media production. We conceptualize language as the vast range of resources that individuals and communities use for communication, sensemaking, and problem-solving. Languages, like technological artifacts, are human-driven systems designed to meet the needs of people. Through a multiphase analysis of student interviews and media artifacts, the findings suggest that most learners privileged the language and cultural norms of the discipline while a few centered their communities’ cultural and language practices. In the first case, students experienced how language norms in engineering within K-12 science classrooms are technologies for assimilation into disciplinary communities, while in the second case, students used their language as a technology for resisting monolingual and monocultural norms. This work points to a need to focus on the ways language norms influence students’ experiences when producing engineering communication for broader communities. By conceptualizing language as a technology, this study provides a sociotechnical approach for understanding communicative practices in engineering and science classrooms while offering guidance for educators to design linguistically inclusive learning spaces.