Introducing Actor–Network Theory via the Engineering Sophomore Year

Abstract

The second year or sophomore year of most 4-year engineering undergraduate programs includes completion of the final fundamental math and science courses required for an engineering degree. We believe the intensive examination of this critical year in undergraduate engineering education is warranted, and advocate for a new perspective in analyzing the social and cultural environments of gateway engineering mathematics courses of the sophomore year -specifically Calculus 3 for Engineers and Differential Equations & Linear Algebra. Our study seeks to identify how students connect to various resources, peers, and content and to what effect as they navigate the curriculum of these high-stakes prerequisites for subsequent major-specific coursework. We study ethnographically the experiences of undergraduate students, graduate student teaching assistants, and faculty instructional staff as they traverse these courses, in order to map out the social and cultural terrain upon which learning, status, and grades are negotiated. Inspired by a novel theory from Science and Technology Studies (STS), we take an actornetwork view of sophomore engineering, tracing connections between human actors and nonhuman elements including mathematical concepts, places, objects, and resources to demonstrate how students are translated to varying degrees through sophomore mathematics courses into actor-networks of engineering. Actor-Network Theory encourages a fresh perspective of sophomore engineering that affords researchers a systems-level view of these critical gateway courses and suggests fundamental questions regarding the nature of our courses and how they got this way in the first place. This paper introduces Actor-Network Theory and the four moments of translation, describes the methods for our research study of sophomore engineers as informed by Actor-Network Theory, and provides justification for the use of this novel social theory in engineering education research. Introduction and Research Purpose

Developing an Instrument to Understand the Social-Structural Integration of Diverse Students

“…Allowing the interaction patterns of the environment to be scrutinized, potentially revealing the hidden social structure of the environment. SNA has been used in a variety of STEM environments ranging from understanding how teaching resources and pedagogies are spread and utilized, 9,25-27 perceptions of other team member interactions, 24 retention and persistence issues, 28,29 and to understand the social process of ethical design. 30 Given the body of literature demonstrating the importance of social interactions we propose that diverse individuals should be dispersed throughout the network to encourage meaningful interactions with a wide variety of people, thus warming the climate of engineering.…”

Using Social Network Analysis to Study the Social Structures of Inclusion

“…The data suggest that students are developing robust and diverse social networks. Several studies have shown that academic success is positively correlated with participation in the social network [10], [30]- [33]. The creation of a heterogenous social network means that students have opportunities to interact with a broad range of students.…”

How Actor-Network Theory Travels and Changes in Engineering Education: A Narrative Literature Review

“…There was no influence of ANT in the analysis and discussion. Also analyzing the educational setting at the program level, Tsai et al (2015) investigated how the sophomore-year mathematics courses (and its elements -teachers, courses, physical space, culture, etc.) translated students that interacted with them.…”

“…The authors took the time to explain the theory and many key concepts, such as the four moments of translation -problematization, interessement, enrollment and mobilization. Tsai et al (2015) used these four moments of translation to analyze how the translation process of students occurred as they interacted with the elements of the mathematics courses.…”

“…Using a very similar process from their earlier work (Tsai et al, 2015), Tsai et al (2018a) investigated how an engineering mathematics course is transformed as it replicated from one university to another, and how the course, in its turn, transformed students, teachers, staff, the program and the new institution. The authors used the four moments of translation to follow the actor into translation, that is, to analyze how the course was interpreted, transformed and accepted by the new institution and how it transformed students and instructors.…”