Cultural Meanings of "Smartness" in High-Needs Elementary Engineering Classrooms

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

Abstract

Purpose

A major gate-keeping mechanism of STEM fields is the cultural practice of smartness. Following Hatt (2012), we frame “smartness as a tool utilized by some not only to determine the social identities of others, but to make sense of their own identity”. The purpose of this study was to examine the potential of an engineering unit to disrupt narrow definitions of school smartness. We asked: what is the cultural production of smartness during an engineering unit in four elementary classrooms?

Theoretical Framework

Smartness. Hatt (2012) argues that judgments about others’ (and one’s own) smartness are based on socially and culturally constructed, rather than innate or fixed notions of competence. In school science, students get recognized as “smart” based on labels and skills that have little to do with STEM competence and dispositions—like mainstream gender performances (Carlone, Webb, Archer, & Taylor, 2015) and compliance (Varelas, Kane, & Wylie, 2011). Engineering has additional cultural referents as a field reserved for the smartest and best students, perpetuating notions of exclusivity (Leslie, Cimpian, Meyer, and Freeland, 2015).

Cultural production. We define cultural production as meanings produced by groups in everyday practice that reproduce and/or counter historically enduring cultural narratives (Eisenhart and Finkel, 1998). Cultural production emphasizes group-level meanings, balances analytic lenses between the micro- and macro-level meanings of smartness.

Methods

Participants included 70 students across two fourth-grade and two fifth-grade classrooms whose teachers experienced one week of professional development about the Engineering is Elementary curriculum (Museum of Science, Boston). Three of the four schools were classified as Title 1. Though we observed nearly every engineering lesson in all four classrooms, the data for this study primarily draw on semi-structured teacher interviews prior to unit enactment and student and teacher end-of-unit interviews. We elicited students’ definitions of engineering, understandings of the norms to be considered smart participants, perceptions about the “smartest” engineers and students in the classroom, and their self-positioning in relation to students they identified as smart.

Results

At the end of the unit, 81% of all students either named themselves and/or were named by at least one other as one of the smartest engineers in their class. Most students identified smart engineers more broadly than they defined smart students, an indication that engineering has potential to disrupt status quo cultural meanings of “smart”. When they identified the smartest engineers among their peers, they included a mix of above-grade level, at-grade-level, and below-grade-level students; whereas they identified mostly above-grade-level students as the smartest students. Their descriptions of engineering smartness were broad and deep (“thinking above and beyond”; “taking time to think about the properties of materials”) versus traditional notions such as getting good grades and having the right answers.

Significance

Our work consistently examines school science and engineering for opportunities for “cracks and fissures” in school’s structures, and we usually come up short (Carlone, Johnson, & Scott, 2015). Prototypical meanings of schooling typically dominate in our ethnographic studies. We are intrigued by our findings that point to broadened meanings of “smartness” through engineering.

Authors

• Heidi Carlone, University of North Carolina - Greensboro

• Tess Anne Hegedus, University of North Carolina - Greensboro

• Megan Martin

• Aundrea D. Carter, University of North Carolina - Greensboro