Producing Calculus (Un)readiness

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

Abstract

Purpose

In prior work (Authors, 2015) we examined the historically and socioculturally produced role of calculus in the U.S. engineering curriculum and the consequences for students in a diversity-promoting program at a state flagship college of engineering. In particular, we identified an emergent category of “calculus readiness” and showed how this category became consequential for students as it interacted with other institutional categorization schemes. Our purpose here is to trace the production of this category. Our analysis, challenging conceptualizations of “calculus readiness” as residing “beneath the skin and between the ears” (Mehan, 1993), shows that students are produced as ready or unready to proceed into calculus based on the coordinated actions of a pre-calculus instructional team, largely in the highly situated process of testing and grading.

Theoretical Framework

We draw theoretically on the “cultural production of the educated person” (Levinson & Holland, 1996; O’Connor, 2003; Stevens et al, 2008). This approach examines culture as a dynamic process in which people draw on cultural forms as they act in social and material contexts, producing themselves as culturally located persons while at the same time reproducing and transforming the cultural formations in which they act. Educational success and failure, in this view, is an important way in which persons become produced within cultural groups, and thereby contributes to the production of the culture.

Methodology

This poster is drawn from a larger study that conducted field-based ethnographic work centered on students, faculty, and staff involved in a diversity program in a prestigious U.S. college of engineering. To trace the production of “calculus readiness,” we attended the weekly meetings of the pre-calculus instructors and we interviewed the lead instructor twice. Because testing and grading emerged as consequential practices, we attended two exam grading sessions. All meetings, grading sessions, and interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. We use Mediated Discourse Analysis (Scollon, 2001) to analyze these transcripts.

Results

We show how “calculus-readiness” is not a neutral diagnosis of a cognitive state. Rather, it is a human-produced category that is contingent on particular institutional practices, including testing and grading. While these practices are often justified as producing “objective” measurements of universal traits, we show that testing and grading are highly situated and are saturated with human subjectivity. For example, the pre-calculus instructors produced final grades based in part on a discussion of how many students were “supposed to fail.”

Significance

Testing and grading are a naturalized part of the institutional infrastructure in the college of engineering. This naturalization works to objectify the categories that these practices produce—including letter grades and “calculus (un)readiness”—by obscuring the human work that went into their production. Our previous work has shown how, because of their presumed objectivity, these categories lead students to identify and be identified through a “cultural deprivation” model. In this study, we reveal the myriad practices, actors, and subjectivities inherent in the production of these categories, thereby challenging the cultural deprivation model, as well interventions (e.g., remediation) that are derived from this model.

Authors

• Frederick Peck, University of Montana - Missoula

• Kevin O'Connor, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Julie Cafarella, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Jacob McWilliams, University of Colorado - Boulder