The Cultural Construction of Engineering Ability in an Undergraduate Programming Class

• In Event: Applying Cultural Construction Frameworks in Engineering Education Research

Abstract

Purpose

This study explores the localized ability hierarchies in an undergraduate programming class for electrical engineers in order to deconstruct them as cultural constructions rather than “abilities” of individual students. In so doing it highlights local classroom interactional, systemic structural, and broader cultural forces which provide support for identifying ability in a local setting.

Theoretical Framework

Our paper draws on and adds to a small but significant body of work that connects local classroom-level interactions to broader patterns of student outcomes (Carlone, Haun-Frank, & Webb, 2011; Tonso, 2006; Esmonde, 2009). We are primarily guided by McDermott (2006) in our attempt to deconstruct engineering ability (and the lack thereof) as a cultural construction (see Theoretical Framework poster).

Methodology

We are studying the implementation of a novel microprocessor-based programming class for electrical engineers at a Major East Coast University. Qualitative data collection from a semester-long 30-person class included one-on-one student interviews, lecture and lab section fieldnoted observations, video of student pairs and projects, and student work. In this paper, we foreground a pair of prototypical students from one lab section who know and interact with one another. One is effectively acquired by a deficit category of students “not cut out for engineering,” while the other is bestowed a “brilliant engineer” position. We elucidate the cultural construction of this pair of localized “educational facts” in order to challenge them.

Results

At a very basic level, students’ programming background (partially) constructed their engineering ability or lack thereof. Students and instructors used programming background labels to interpret individual students’ achievement in the class. Instead of taking it for granted, we interrogate this label as a cultural construction to unlock new understandings of its power in shaping students’ experiences of the class. Contributions to this cultural construction include an economic system which values programming as an important skill for engineers, a time period wherein programming has achieved partial normativity in the educational preparation of American undergraduate students, a differentiation of programming ability amongst lines of privilege associated with socioeconomic status, race, and gender, and a set of particular students in a class on whom these differentiations have become locally inscribed.

Engineering ability was also constructed via local interactions constrained by larger systemic and cultural processes. In lecture, advanced questions were affirmed and encouraged, leaving little time for more basic questions and content learning. Class participants understood who had ability and who did not based on these “performances” of ability. In lab, weeks with time-constrained individual lab-work made public which students were finishing a lab first or last. We suggest that these interactions are constrained within the broader cultural forces of product-focused (and not learning-focused) engineering education, and meritocratic university sorting procedures.

Significance

Our findings implicate many of the interactional mechanisms and cultural underpinnings involved with day-to-day instantiations of ability and inequity in undergraduate engineering classes. By locating the problems outside of individuals, this research intends to be a first step towards finding new operational solutions to problems of equity and access long seen as intractable and inevitable.

Authors

• Stephen Douglas Secules, University of Maryland - College Park

• Ayush Gupta, University of Maryland - College Park

• Andrew R. Elby, University of Maryland - College Park

• Chandra Anne Turpen, University of Maryland - College Park