Care Praxis-Driven STEM Design for Sustainable and Just Communities in Middle School
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| Title: | Care Praxis-Driven STEM Design for Sustainable and Just Communities in Middle School |
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| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Wisam Sedawi (ORCID |
| Source: | Journal of Research in Science Teaching. 2026 63(7):671-690. |
| Availability: | Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 20 |
| Publication Date: | 2026 |
| Sponsoring Agency: | National Science Foundation (NSF), Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL) |
| Contract Number: | 2201083 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Research |
| Education Level: | Junior High Schools Middle Schools Secondary Education |
| Descriptors: | STEM Education, Middle School Teachers, Middle School Students, Caring, Ethics, Praxis, Problem Solving, Ethnography, Urban Schools, Well Being, Design, Transformative Learning, Epistemology, Humanization, Social Justice |
| DOI: | 10.1002/tea.70063 |
| ISSN: | 0022-4308 1098-2736 |
| Abstract: | Despite the growing interest in incorporating care ethics into STEM education, these topics are rarely integrated into K-12 standards and pedagogical practice. We explore how care praxis, a political and ethical approach to STEM education, supports students' sense-making in addressing real-world problems throughout STEM design, merging social, environmental, and technical aspects. Care praxis highlights the iterative, reflective method of initiating action, acting as an ethical, political, humanistic, and justice-oriented mode of engagement with the world, thereby fostering sustainable communities. Drawing upon participatory critical design-based research and ethnographic methods, we collaborated with two teachers, students, and families from an urban middle school classroom to adapt and implement a STEM curriculum that focuses on engineering for sustainable communities. Our findings show how a care praxis in the context of a STEM unit focused on engineering for sustainable communities can support students in more expansive sense-making by enacting care-oriented, community-engaged engineering practices. The process was facilitated through four stages of caring within the design cycle: (1) caring-about social needs (identifying a problem), (2) taking-care by solidifying and prioritizing these needs (refining a problem in collaboration with community and determining criteria for solving a problem), (3) care-giving by designing solutions that connect social, environmental, and technical aspects (designing and iterating solutions), and (4) nested-care by expanding the design functionality to foster well-being and active participation in community building (integrating designs into everyday practice). We discuss how to enact the transformative potential of integrating a care praxis into middle school STEM education, thereby fostering a more contextual and ethical approach to design solutions. A care praxis approach bridges epistemologies and ontologies, creating a productive space for students to engage in sense-making around humanization and justice-oriented aspects of science and engineering. |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Entry Date: | 20260101 |
| Accession Number: | EJ1516278 |
| Database: | ERIC |
| Abstract: | Despite the growing interest in incorporating care ethics into STEM education, these topics are rarely integrated into K-12 standards and pedagogical practice. We explore how care praxis, a political and ethical approach to STEM education, supports students' sense-making in addressing real-world problems throughout STEM design, merging social, environmental, and technical aspects. Care praxis highlights the iterative, reflective method of initiating action, acting as an ethical, political, humanistic, and justice-oriented mode of engagement with the world, thereby fostering sustainable communities. Drawing upon participatory critical design-based research and ethnographic methods, we collaborated with two teachers, students, and families from an urban middle school classroom to adapt and implement a STEM curriculum that focuses on engineering for sustainable communities. Our findings show how a care praxis in the context of a STEM unit focused on engineering for sustainable communities can support students in more expansive sense-making by enacting care-oriented, community-engaged engineering practices. The process was facilitated through four stages of caring within the design cycle: (1) caring-about social needs (identifying a problem), (2) taking-care by solidifying and prioritizing these needs (refining a problem in collaboration with community and determining criteria for solving a problem), (3) care-giving by designing solutions that connect social, environmental, and technical aspects (designing and iterating solutions), and (4) nested-care by expanding the design functionality to foster well-being and active participation in community building (integrating designs into everyday practice). We discuss how to enact the transformative potential of integrating a care praxis into middle school STEM education, thereby fostering a more contextual and ethical approach to design solutions. A care praxis approach bridges epistemologies and ontologies, creating a productive space for students to engage in sense-making around humanization and justice-oriented aspects of science and engineering. |
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| ISSN: | 0022-4308 1098-2736 |
| DOI: | 10.1002/tea.70063 |
