The Role of Peer interaction and Language Resources in Informal Engineering Learning Environments: The Case for Learning Through Biking

This paper conceptually explores the ideas of peer interaction and language resources in engineering education. Peer interaction is the engagement of students in learning activities with others, leveraging their collective resources, including the languages practices and cultural understandings of their communities. The social dynamics involved in peer interaction, and mediated through language, have the potential to create a supportive atmosphere where learners feel safe to take intellectual risks in STEM-related concepts and practices. Research on peer interaction in informal learning environments, where students may engage in self-directed exploration and experimentation, is critical for understanding the role of everyday activities in engineering education in multilingual and multidialectic contexts. Our work focuses on how language-minoritized learners engage with one another in informal engineering learning environments to make sense of the world around them through their community resources. It attends particularly to social exchanges, such as instances of cooperation, play, and conflict resolution. Drawing on our understanding of peer interaction and language, our work seeks to conceptually illustrate the opportunities for engineering learning in informal learning experiences focused on bikes and biking for multilingual and multidialectic youth in grades 9-10. Bikes are presented as a design artifact and biking as an opportunity to connect scientific and technical ideas with students’ lived experiences. For instance, students may apply engineering design principles, study bike biomechanics, and use the bike to examine their built environment and learn from people. This study emphasizes what theoretical ideas could be used to understand engagement, mentorship and leadership in how peer interaction and language resources may influence students' sense-making of the engineering activities.