Expanding Sixth-Grade Youth’s Understanding Of Engineering Through Critical Multilingual Journalism

Chelsea Andrews, PI

Kristen Wendell, Co-PI

Greses Perez, Co-PI 

The Community-Tech-Press project, led by Research Assistant Professor Chelsea Andrews, Associate Professor Kristen Wendell, and McDonnell Family Assistant Professor Greses Pérez, is a 6th-grade science curriculum partnership between Tufts CEEO and Somerville Public Schools. The team, which includes graduate researchers Clara Mabour and Fatima Rahman, has developed a 20-lesson curriculum unit in which students explore climate science, climate tech, and climate journalism in Somerville. After examining evidence of local climate change impacts and using engineering design to build prototype versions of climate tech, students draw on their language resources to produce community journalism that shares what they’ve learned with a chosen local audience.

teachers building model shade structure with fabric and wooden skewers
Somerville Public School teachers building a model shade structure.

In the first year of the project, in collaboration with Somerville Public School teachers, we developed and piloted the curriculum in two schools. This year, 2025, we conducted a teacher professional development for the revised curriculum and supported its implementation in four different schools with 240 students. The 6th-grade students centered their own experiences and community resources to create their final journalism artifacts which include videos and posters. In June, 135 of these students also presented these journalism artifacts to the Tufts community. 

Two thermometers measuring temperature under a heat lamp
Testing shade structures under a heat lamp

We have analyzed student interviews, student-created journalism artifacts and whole class discussions to explore the ways in which students have valued their own multilingualism in the engineering unit and how they have drawn on their vast language, cultural and community resources. Research has also focused on how the place-based nature of the curriculum has supported students in enacting critical engineering agency – i.e. leveraging their own identities, to strategically engage resources in pursuit of their own goals. Finally, we have also explored how students engage in sociotechnical classroom discussions. Findings show that perspective and context additions, rooted in community experiences, supported student reasoning on the need for justice-centered engineering designs.