Smartness in Engineering Culture:  An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

Dringenberg, Emily; Secules, Stephen; Kramer, Amy

doi:10.18260/1-2--33272

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…This contribution is warranted because while some have revealed the reinforcing ways that everyday moments in engineering result in the sorting of students as capable of doing engineering or not (Secules et al, 2018), many other engineering education researchers' efforts to directly investigate the idea of ability (including our own) have mostly focused on intelligence through the lens of Dweck's mindset theory (Dringenberg et al, 2018; Dringenberg & Kramer, 2019; Reid & Ferguson, 2014; Stump et al, 2014), and more work is needed to understand how smartness as a cultural practice manifests in engineering education. Furthermore, we focus on shared beliefs because we understand them as a pragmatic way to connect individual and cultural levels of educational practice (Dringenberg et al, 2019).…”

Section: Research Purpose and Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Smartness in engineering: Beliefs of undergraduate engineering students

Dringenberg

Kramer

Betz

2022

J of Engineering Edu

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Background: Modern engineering culture is rooted in assumptions of intellectual superiority. Scholars have demonstrated that smartness functions as an oppressive cultural practice in educational settings. However, the shared ways in which undergraduate engineering students understand what it means to be smart remain largely implicit and unexamined.Purpose/Hypothesis: We investigated the beliefs held by students about what it means to be smart and the role of smartness in their undergraduate education. Design/Method: We conducted one-on-one, semi-structured interviews with 20 students at a predominately White institution. Our team utilized open, descriptive coding to iteratively condense our data into categories, codes, and subcodes, followed by analysis to identify and characterize the participants' commonly held beliefs. Results: Students believed that being smart is working efficiently or maximizing outcomes while minimizing effort. Determining smartness as efficiency included social comparison and assumptions about effort, which introduced ambiguity into students' judgments of smartness. The resulting social hierarchy (relative positioning as smart) was commonly believed to enable or restrict access to necessary resources.Conclusions: Students' belief that smartness is an individual capacity to work more efficiently than others obfuscates the reality of smartness as a cultural practice that is baked into our systems and perpetuates inequity. Without action to reveal and disrupt smartness as a structural and oppressive practice, the status quo of inequitable participation in engineering will persist.

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Section: Research Purpose and Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Smartness in engineering: Beliefs of undergraduate engineering students

Dringenberg

Kramer

Betz

2022

J of Engineering Edu

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“…Recent attention to smartness in engineering culture (Dringenberg et al, 2019) and our participants' rejection of this stereotype suggests that this might be an interesting area for future research.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Developing Engineering Identity in an Introductory Engineering Course: A Multi-Case Analysis

Gray¹,

Gray

Canipe

et al. 2021

Journal of Research in Science, Mathematics and Technology Education

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Research in engineering education has identified several factors relevant to the development of students’ identity as engineers. Here we examine the engineering identity of undergraduate engineering students after an introductory engineering course. The specific research question explored here is: "How do engineering students in an introductory engineering course interpret competence, performance, and recognition in relation to their identities as engineers?” We used a modified engineering identity framework to explore the development of engineering identity within the undergraduate engineering context through a multiple case study approach. Six students majoring in engineering participated in the study. The students had divergent perspectives on what it meant to be competent as an engineer. In all cases, students connected both competence and performance as an engineer with persistence. At this introductory stage, self-recognition as an engineering person took center stage for each student. All were able to identify themselves strongly as an engineering person. The findings add to the current understandings about the development of engineering identity, and suggest that engineering identity may be critically important in conversations about the steps faculty may take in working with students to promote increased retention of undergraduate students in engineering.

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“…The excerpt from the focus group showed how students resist the notion of smartness but collectively maintained a narrative of engineers' superior status. Departing from the broader public narrative of smartness (i.e., as represented on "the internet"; see Dringenberg et al, 2019;Kramer et al, 2020) they identified hard work and the conceptual nature of engineering as markers of the discipline's superiority. In a striking pattern of shared speech, the students collectively negotiated a consensus around these alternative definitional markers in ways that included nuance ("everyone can do it") and also demarcated engineering from other, "lesser" disciplines ("She [a nursing major] had to memorize everything.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coupling Methodological Commitments to Make Sense of Socio-Psychological Experience

Huff

Walther

Sochacka

et al. 2020

Studies in Engineering Education

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Background:The engineering education research community has embraced a diverse range of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research approaches. In line with the pragmatic roots of both engineering practice and education, we concur with past scholars that no particular method is better than any other. Rather, the method should be determined by the nature of the research object or the social reality of interest. Purpose/Hypothesis:The purpose of this article is to discuss investigations of complex phenomena that have both individual and socially constructed features by using a mixed qualitative methods approach. Our discussion focuses on how to honor, maintain, and leverage the methodological commitments of multiple approaches to achieve a coherent understanding of the social reality under investigation. Design/Method: We introduce a method to map a social system of interest and define the scope and nature of a specific and researchable social reality within that social system. We specifically draw on an example of our study of professional shame in engineering contexts, describing how articulating this social reality enabled us to select two qualitative approaches, interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and ethnographic focus groups, to thoroughly examine the phenomenon. Results: Drawing on data from a larger study, we demonstrate how the two methodologies allowed us to see different features of professional shame. IPA provided a lens into students' intrapsychic experiences of shame, while the ethnographic lens provided a window into the social construction and maintenance of the norms, expectations, and master narratives that can provoke shame experiences in individual students. Conclusions: We found that combining multiple qualitative methods, based on an explicit and shared definition of the social reality under investigation, afforded a coherent, empirical understanding of a complex social reality that one method alone could not have provided. Although mixing qualitative methods does demand a cogent way of managing multiple methodological mindsets, the whole outcome of both approaches was greater than the sum of the individual parts. We encourage other engineering education researchers to similarly consider the use of mixed qualitative methods when investigating complex socio-psychological phenomena.

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Smartness in Engineering Culture: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

Cited by 6 publications

References 32 publications

Smartness in engineering: Beliefs of undergraduate engineering students

Smartness in engineering: Beliefs of undergraduate engineering students

Developing Engineering Identity in an Introductory Engineering Course: A Multi-Case Analysis

Coupling Methodological Commitments to Make Sense of Socio-Psychological Experience

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