Background
Women and men of color and White women participate in American engineering education in lower proportions than they represent in the general U.S. population. Much existing engineering ...education research uses individual‐level (such as psychological) theories to explain this difference. The study reported here instead takes a structural perspective, asking how social relations are coordinated in engineering education.
Purpose
This study explores how the intersection of ruling relations, critical race, and feminist theories can investigate how gender and race are built into engineering education's institutional structure.
Design/Method
This study used interviews collected from 17 women and men of color and White women who were engineering undergraduate students at U.S. universities. The interviews were drawn from a project that takes as its premise that learning from such small numbers of students facilitates analyzing data intersectionally. The primary analysis used narrative methods through repeated readings.
Results
I offer empirically based illustrations of ruling relations in U.S. universities and schools of engineering that unduly impact minoritized populations. These illustrations include discussions of financial aid knowledge, meeting the needs of transfer and Native students, and how schools crafting “the ideal student” as a young, single White male problematically impact minoritized students. The results illustrate how ruling relations structure engineering education in White‐ and male‐dominated ways.
Conclusions
This paper offers questions to help readers consider how ruling relations race and gender their own institutions. In addition, it offers an interpretive, emergent method for interrogating institutional structure and ideas for future work using ruling relations in engineering education research.
Background
U.S. engineering educators are discussing how we define engineering to ourselves and to others, such as in the recently released U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) report, Changing ...the Conversation. In these conversations, leaders have proposed the skills, knowledge, processes, values, and attitudes that should define engineering. However, little attention has been paid to the daily work of engineering faculty, through their engineering research and teaching students to be new engineers, that puts these discipline‐defining ideas into practice in academia.
Purpose (Hypothesis)
The different types of narratives engineering faculty explicitly or implicitly use to describe engineering are categorized. Categorizing these common narratives can help inform the nationwide conversation about whether these are the best narratives to tell in order to attract a diverse population of future engineers.
Design/Method
Interviews with ten engineering faculty at a research‐extensive university were conducted. Interview transcripts were coded thematically through coarse then fine coding passes. The coarse codes were drawn from boundary theory; the fine codes emerged from the data.
Results
Faculty members' descriptions moved within and among the narratives of engineering as applied science and math, as problem‐solving, and as making things. The narratives are termed “universalized” because of their broad‐sweeping discursive application within and across participants' interviews.
Conclusions
These narratives drawn from academic engineers' practice put engineering at odds with recommendations from the NAE report. However, naming the narratives helps make them visible so we may then develop and practice telling contrasting narratives to future and current engineering students.
This paper contributes new perspectives on the underrepresentation of female faculty in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines by identifying how faculty themselves ...conceptualize or make sense of the problem. We conducted in-depth interviews with 19 STEM faculty members. The interviews were employed to identify discourses faculty engage in their explanations for underrepresentation. Work-family balance emerged as the leading theme, with participants identifying many challenges thereto. As participants discussed work-family balance, they engaged a discourse of choice to frame the challenges faced by female faculty members in particular. We relate the discourse of choice to the persistence of gender inequalities in STEM departments.
Background
Teamwork has become a central element of engineering education. However, the race‐ and gender‐based marginalization prevalent in society is also prevalent in engineering student teams. ...These problematic dynamics limit learning opportunities, isolate historically marginalized students, and ultimately push students away from engineering, further reinforcing the demographic imbalances in the profession.
Purpose
While there are strategies to improve the experiences of marginalized students within teams, there are few tools for detecting marginalizing behaviors as they occur. The purpose of this work is to examine how peer evaluations collected as a normal part of an engineering course can be used as a window into team dynamics to reveal marginalization as it occurs.
Method
We used a semester of peer evaluation data from a large engineering course in which a team project is the central assignment and peer evaluation occurs four times during the course. We designed an algorithm to identify teams where marginalization may be occurring. We then performed qualitative analyses using a sociolinguistic analysis.
Results
Results show that the algorithm helps identify teams where marginalization occurs. Qualitative analyses of four illustrative cases demonstrated the stealth appearance and evolution of marginalization, providing strong evidence that hidden within language of peer evaluation are indicators of marginalization. Based on the wider dataset, we present a taxonomy (eight categories) of linguistic marginalization appearing in peer comments.
Conclusion
Both peer evaluation scores and the language used in peer evaluations can reveal team inequities and may serve as a near‐real‐time mechanism to interrupt marginalization within engineering teams.
For decades, American researchers have brought intellectual, financial and labor resources to understanding minority underrepresentation in engineering, including through studies of persistent racial ...and gender discrimination in higher engineering education. This paper considers prevailing standards for legitimate and significant research in this area and the persistent stigma associated with the study of small populations. The preference among many engineering education research producers and consumers for the 'large-n' brings with it presumptions about human differences including ideas of race, gender, disability and other categories by which subjects are customarily sorted for analytic purposes. This paper asks how such epistemic preferences enact power, showing how taxonomic inclinations may prevent incisive understanding of demographic privilege in U.S. higher technical education. We offer an illustrative contrast to such studies, describing a qualitative research project on underrepresented minorities in U.S. engineering schools, called 'Learning from Small Numbers'. This project shows the analytic value of intersectional, Queer, and Disabilities Studies theories to interrogate inequity in engineering education. We argue that the reflexivity and indeterminacy supported by these theories illuminates the ruling relations of academic social sciences overall, while also reflecting on our own research preferences. There is no feature of an investigative project, including definitions of subject populations and choice of research methodology, that is not actively chosen by researchers, and it is the profound social consequences of these choices in equity-focused engineering education research that we want to consider.
Background
Prior to undertaking studies involving human subjects, engineering education researchers are required to consider the ethical implications of their work by obtaining approval from an ...ethical review board.
Purpose/Hypothesis
Recent research suggests that some unintended consequences of this procedure are that it externalizes and inflexibly formalizes ethical considerations, and limits researchers’ readiness to systematically identify and consider ethical questions that arise while conducting research.
Design/Method
We used a collaborative inquiry approach to examine such ethically important moments that emerged in two of our interpretive research projects. We drew on Walther, Sochacka, and Kellam's framework for interpretive research quality as the departure point for our shared sense‐making process.
Results
Our explorations revealed two insights that connect research ethics to research quality in novel ways. First, we found that the quality of our work improved when we critically explored the intersections between our motivations and intentions for investigating particular research topics and broader cultural agendas and assumptions. Second, we found that when we actively sought to do justice to the participants, co‐investigators, and readers of our research, we were afforded with opportunities to increase the quality of our work, in sometimes quite unexpected ways.
Conclusions
We synthesized the findings from our collaborative inquiry into a process‐oriented model for ethical validation, which we propose as a sixth construct to our prior five‐construct framework for interpretive research quality.
Background
Engaging future engineers is a central topic in everyday conversations on engineering education. Considerable investments have been made to make engineering more engaging, recruit and ...retain aspiring engineers, and to design an education to prepare future engineers. However, the impact of these efforts has been less than intended. It is imperative that the community reflects on progress and sets a more effective path for the future.
Purpose
The purpose of this article is to map a new innovation landscape for what it means to engage future engineers. This is a theoretically grounded divergent‐thinking effort to enable a broader space of high impact innovations for engaging future engineers.
Scope/Method
A multiple perspectives methodology drawing from innovation, cross‐disciplinary, and boundary work frameworks was used to make visible multiple facets of engaging future engineers. Scholars from diverse communities of thought and discourse were selected to present interparadigmatic perspectives, act as boundary agents, challenge and transform current ways of thinking, and illustrate new opportunities for engineering education innovation.
Conclusions
A new innovation landscape for engaging future engineers is needed, one that emphasizes epistemological development and social justice, new configurations on engineering thinking and connecting to the formative years of development, the entwinement of engineering knowing and being, and mutually informing consequences for opening up a broader space for innovation. We also need to adopt strategies and tools for using a multiple perspectives approach to better understand complex engineering education problems.
Background
The field of engineering education research is adopting an increasingly diverse range of qualitative methods. These developments necessitate a coherent language and conceptual framework to ...critically engage with questions of qualitative research quality.
Purpose/Hypothesis
This article advances discussions of qualitative research quality through sharing and analyzing a methodologically diverse, practice‐based exploration of research quality in the context of five engineering education research studies.
Design/Method
As a group of seven engineering education researchers, we drew on the collaborative inquiry method to systematically examine questions of qualitative research quality in our everyday research practice. We used a process‐based, theoretical framework for research quality as the anchor for these explorations.
Results
We constructed five practice explorations spanning grounded theory, interpretative phenomenological analysis, and various forms of narrative inquiry. Examining the individual contributions as a whole yielded four key insights: quality challenges require examination from multiple theoretical lenses; questions of research quality are implicitly infused in research practice; research quality extends beyond the objects, procedures, and products of research to concern the human context and local research setting; and research quality lies at the heart of introducing novices to interpretive research.
Conclusions
This study demonstrates the potential and further need for the engineering education community to advance methodological theory through purposeful and reflective engagement in research practice across the diverse methodological approaches currently being adopted.
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