The Feminist Engineering Classroom: A Vision For Future Educational Interventions

Abstract

In the quest for the gender equalization of the engineering profession, a variety of strategies are being developed and used in daily engineering education practice. Colleges and universities are recruiting girls and women in increasing numbers into the so-called "engineering pipeline" by using camps, special classes, printed and internet-based advertising, and/or "girl-power" media programming to make engineering's image more appealing -for example, as fun, socially useful, and multidisciplinary. Concurrently, engineering instructors and faculty are redesigning engineering education using different classroom techniques more congruent with current managerial trends found in industry. These lean towards a focus on group work and interdisciplinarity, which have the added advantage through their political and material reputation as being purportedly more "women-friendly" than traditional methods. These different interventions are crucial in the nation-wide quest to have men and women more proportionately represented in engineering. Arguably, the last bastion is to address the content of engineering courses, which has changed only superficially. This is despite considerable theoretical and practical critiques of science and engineering practice in academia that have been made by feminist researchers and educators. This paper introduces the field of feminist science studies to engineering educators, discusses various explicitly feminist approaches to changing content in engineering, and challenges engineering educators to consider what a "feminist engineering classroom" might consist of with respect to content.

"A New Way of Seeing": Engagement With Women’s and Gender Studies Fosters Engineering Identity Formation

“…It made me think more critically about the studies I read, my own biases, and how I can design better," said one engineering student. This is consistent with the work of Cech [19] and Pawley [42] and with Evelyn Fox Keller's notion that the myth of STEM objectivity perpetuates exclusion and marginalization. Our findings suggest that an understanding of STEM's non-neutrality is empowering and liberatory for some underrepresented students in engineering, and correlates with their sense of belonging and engineering identity development.…”

Reversing the Logic

“…For professional skills (which include teamwork and communication), research indicates that working in small, collaborating groups enhances female STEM students' attitudes and achievements in particular (P. B. Campbell, Jolly, Hoey, & Perlman, 2002;Johnson & Johnson, 1983;Pawley, 2004). These findings raise future research questions: (a) Might females have a different affinity for certain skills than males?…”

Flipping the Classroom - Do Student Learning Gains and Perceptions Vary Based on Gender?

“…More than 70% of the STEM faculty at SCU report using lecture as their main form of instruction all or most of the time, as compared to 56% of all the SCU faculty and 51% of all reporting faculty nationwide. Based on these numbers it is likely the students received the prerequisite instruction in a lecture style format, which would have a greater negative impact on the performance of the female students [4], [5]. The inclusion of active pedagogies versus lecture could also account for the significant disparity between the females' pre-and post-concept inventory gains versus the males' gains, with the males scoring 50% higher than the females on the pre-concept inventory but only 7.0% higher on the post.…”

“…Additional studies have reported the importance of collaborative and small-group instruction on the performance and motivation of female students [4], [5]. Female students also indicate stronger frustrations with what they view as poor teaching and are more likely to leave engineering than male counterparts with equivalent GPAs [6].…”

“…Figure3: Survey results from survey question 'As a results of this class my interest in engineering' from all sections and separated for male and female students. Survey options were a Likert scale from Greatly Decreased (1) to Greatly Increased(5) …”