Work in Progress: Relational Justice and Collaborative Self-Determination in Engineering Education

Within engineering and science education, the value of collaborative work has been well established.Research underscores the significant advantages of joint-activity and learning collaboratively, including social, cognitive, and disciplinary skill development in addition to cross-cultural communication among people from diverse races, genders, and ethnicities (Boaler, 2008).In science and engineering classrooms, the National Research Council (2015) recognizes environments that provide opportunities for collaborative learning to be important spaces for developing 21st-century skills needed for all young people.In this work-in-progress paper, we examine some emergent patterns found in the joint activity systems of a STEAM summer program; especially we describe two emergent, distinct patterns of collaborative interaction which we label as "type 1" and "type 2," one of which we find to be more conducive to the kind of collaboration that can foster "relational just" interactions.