Care Praxis–Driven STEM Design for Sustainable and Just Communities in Middle School

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.