Contested Legitimacy: Filiation Work in the Sorting Out of Engineering Students

• In Event: 60.065 - Decentering Dominant Discourses and Reimagining Privileged Spaces in STEM Education

Abstract

Objectives
Situated learning theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991) proposed the notion of legitimate peripheral participation as central to a newcomer’s trajectory toward membership in a community of practice. Left underdeveloped were issues of how newcomers arrived at the periphery of a community; which other community memberships these newcomers might have; and what are the processes by which legitimacy was conferred or denied (Lave, 2008; Nespor, 1994; O’Connor, 2003). These are critically important issues in the STEM fields in the U.S., given persistent attempts to increase representation in these fields of members of historically underrepresented groups. Our objective in this poster is to address these questions by considering the relationship between objects and participation as newcomers enter into a community of practice.

Theoretical Framework
In this study we draw on two key theoretical constructs to examine the relationship between objects and participation as newcomers enter into a community of practice. Trajectories of membership (Bowker & Star, 1999; Lave & Wenger, 1991) describe the adoption of and conferral of identities upon newcomers. Trajectories of naturalization (Star & Bowker, 1997; Bowker & Star, 1999) describe the ways in which objects—including categories and categorization systems—enter into and become naturalized within a community of practice. Of particular interest here is the way that people become tied to categories, a process that Bowker and Star (1999) call filiation.

Methods
We conducted field-based ethnographic work centered on students, faculty, and staff involved in a diversity program in a prestigious U.S. college of engineering. The goal of our data collection was to capture student experiences and the ways in which those experiences were organized. To do so, we used a variety of fieldwork methods including ethnographic observations, video-recordings of routine activities, interviews, and focus groups. Our data include fieldnotes, meeting minutes, and video and audio recordings of routine activities, interviews, and focus groups.

Our analysis involved concurrent engagement in data collection and data analysis, using Constant Comparative Analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). We analyzed data from initial fieldwork early in the research process, leading to a preliminary “grounded theory” (Glaser & Strauss, 1969), which led in turn to further fieldwork to refine the theory, and so on through multiple iterative cycles.

Findings
We discuss the filiation work (Bowker & Star, 1999) by students, staff, and faculty involved in the diversity program. We show how an emergent category of “calculus readiness,” tied to a longstanding identification of engineering with mathematics, entered into relationships with other classification systems to produce divergent trajectories for students in the program.

Significance
This study contributes to situated learning theory by examining the filiation work that binds trajectories of membership with trajectories of naturalization. Understanding this contentious process is particularly important in STEM fields, given the intense interest in trajectories of membership into STEM fields for members of historically underrepresented groups.

Authors

• Kevin O'Connor, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Frederick Peck, University of Montana - Missoula

• Julie Cafarella, University of Colorado - Boulder