"Turning away" from the Struggling Individual Student: An Account of the Cultural Construction of Engineering Ability in an Undergraduate Programming Class

Abstract

Andrew Elby's work focuses on student and teacher epistemologies and how they couple to other cognitive machinery and help to drive behavior in learning environments. His academic training was in Physics and Philosophy before he turned to science (particularly physics) education research. More recently, he has started exploring engineering students' entangled identities and epistemologies. Dr. Ayush Gupta, University of Maryland, College ParkAyush Gupta is Assistant Research Professor in Physics and Keystone Instructor in the A. J. Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland. Broadly speaking he is interested in modeling learning and reasoning processes. In particular, he is attracted to fine-grained analysis of video data both from a microgenetic learning analysis methodology (drawing on knowledge in pieces) as well as interaction analysis methodology. He has been working on how learners' emotions are coupled with their conceptual and epistemological reasoning. He is also interested in developing models of the dynamics of categorizations (ontological) underlying students' reasoning in physics. Lately, he has been interested in engineering design thinking and engineering ethics education.

Supporting the Narrative Agency of a Marginalized Engineering Student

“…We suggest that students' experiences in STEM can be viewed as situated within similar systems of oppression, systems influenced by gender and racial dominance, marginalization (Foor et al, 2007), and the construction of students as "not cut out for" STEM (Secules, Gupta, & Elby, 2016). Like hooks, students are engaged in a day-today struggle embedded inside oppressive narratives and systems.…”

Putting Diversity in Perspective: A Critical Cultural Historical Context for Representation in Engineering

“…He argues that the American ingrained cultural value of meritocracy fuels the construction of success and corresponding failure in everyday classroom interactions (Varenne & McDermott, 1999). Education as constructing failure appears to hold explanatory power in engineering undergraduate classrooms as well (Secules et al, 2016). How does the engineering context extend McDermott's arguments for the principle meritocratic function of US school?…”

“…There were several reasons for the choice to center these three cultural norms. First, these cultural norms emerged out of and were identified in the author's prior ethnographic work on engineering educational settings (Secules, Gupta, & Elby, 2016), and were implicated in the construction of classroom-based marginalization. Other ethnographers of engineering education have also noted the prominence and impact of masculinity/gender (Foor et al, 2007;Pawley, 2008;Tonso, 1996Tonso, , 2006, meritocracy/competition (Foor et al, 2007;O'Connor, Peck, Cafarella, & McWilliams, 2016;Stevens, Amos, Jocuns, & Garrison, 2007), and whiteness/racial normativity (Battey & Leyva, 2016;Foor et al, 2007).…”

“…As support for these alternative frames, a study on the affordances of active learning in its different forms (Prince, 2004) concluded that collaborative and cooperative learning environments in engineering result in more learning than (individually) competitive environments. Unexplored within this scope of research is a reality that many of the collaborative and cooperative active learning environments in present day engineering education are actually nested within and framed as grand competitions, and that even classroom events without a competition framing often take up competitive interpersonal interactions (Secules et al, 2016). When other disciplines (e.g., my PhD home department of education) enlist students in a collaborative learning activity, they rarely conduct it as a competition.…”

A Practitioner Account of Integrating Macro-ethics Discussion in an Engineering Design Class

“…Technological determinism has often been described as characterizing the culture of engineering and our classrooms (Cech, 2014). But as with other aspects of culture (McDermott & Varenne, 1995;Secules, Elby, & Gupta, 2016;Secules, Gupta, Elby & Turpen, accepted), this is also emergent from seemingly innocuous actions of engineers, educators, policy makers, institutions, corporations, and a host of other actors. This also gives us hope, in the sense that the cultural "construction" of technological determinism can be locally interrupted.…”