Asset-based Approaches to Engineering Design Education: A Scoping Review of Theory and Practice

Asset-based practices in engineering education are intentional ways of acknowledging and leveraging strengths of students, including their everyday experiences, knowledge, and cultural practices to serve as resources for teaching and learning. Such assets or strengths, broadly, may include but not limited to mediational and navigational skills, community networks, language and communication skills, tinkering skills and knowledge, and most importantly, their lived experiences. While asset-based practices can generally foster development of engineering identities in students, there is limited work that summarizes and connects conceptual frameworks to practical pedagogical methods in engineering design courses. With a focus on Hispanic and Latinx communities, this study performs a scoping literature review to answer the following questions: • What types of assets do students bring into engineering programs? • What are implications of asset-based approaches to engineering, engineering design process, and design pedagogy? • What are some pedagogical strategies for implementing asset-based practices in engineering and engineering design courses? The review was informed by Arksey and O'Malley's five-stage methodology for conducting scoping reviews. The search was performed on several literature databases including ERIC, Engineering Village, Scopus, and the proceedings of ASEE conferences. Findings from this study demonstrate the extent and nature of asset-based practices both in theory and practice, and helped identify a variety of practical asset-based pedagogical strategies from community-inspired design projects and asset-mapping to translanguaging and cross-institutional faculty professional development initiatives. We believe that these findings will potentially motivate the engineering education community to actively implement asset-based approaches in design instruction, and further develop and test more nuanced strategies that draw upon students' funds of knowledge and cultural wealth.