Paper 3: Making Space for Identity Work in Engineering through Design Research

• In Event: Reimagining Researcher-Participant Relations in Engineering and Computing Education

Abstract

Objectives
We explore new ways to study and support becoming in engineering education. While interventions have demonstrated success in supporting students’ identity formation, the field lacks deep theoretical understanding of why these interventions are effective (Authors, 2018). Using design research (Edelson, 2002), we explore learning environments that support students in negotiating processes of becoming engineers.

Theoretical Perspectives
We use “identity work” as a theoretical construct to address the ways individuals navigate tensions in processes of becoming (Calabrese Barton et al., 2013) when their identities do not connect with the dominant narratives of engineering – e.g., technocentricity, competitiveness (Cech, 2014; Slaton, 2015). Identity work encompasses the actions we take and the relationships we form to reauthor identities and reposition ourselves in the process of becoming (Calabrese Barton et al., 2021a).

Methods and Data
This research shares the design of a college-level course focused on making (Authors, 2019) where activities encouraged students to navigate their identity work as it related to becoming engineers. The course, Making to Learn, implemented expansive forms of making–bridging arts, crafting, and STEM–to support students to explore their relationships to making and to participation in STEM disciplines. Using class observations, reflection assignments, and interviews during the course and over the subsequent 2 years, we present a case study (Yin, 2009) of Sarah – an undergraduate engineering major – navigating her journey becoming an engineer.

Findings
During the course, Sarah narrated multiple stories about her history as a maker–e.g., participating in one of California’s first educational makerspaces, keeping a closet of making supplies as a child, and how she would “just go into the garage” to experiment. Sarah knew how to sew, knit, and do woodworking, but engineering school focused on “technically impressive” products, which did not resonate with her history as a maker. She shared, “It's hard for me not to get imposter syndrome, not in a way that I feel like I don't deserve to be here, but in a way that I’ll never be able to know as much as other people in the class, like other mechanical engineering students.”

Through the course, Sarah explored tinkering, bricolage, and play as ways of relating to materials and problem contexts. She remapped her making history to engineering practice, “...where the making is so much the process, not necessarily what you... like the end goal. [...] You're just making new ways to do things and trying to figure [it] out.” We share examples of her making, reflection prompts, and interview transcripts to illustrate how the course supported her continued re-storying (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016) of the relationships between making and her becoming in engineering.

Scholarly significance
Design research can support engineering students’ identity work as a collective activity. Structuring research commitments around reflection and storying as collective acts of meaning-making – for scholars and participants – offers new ways to understand processes of becoming. Sarah’s story of her relationship to engineering is a gift to us scholars, but also meaningful to her journey becoming an engineer.

Authors

• Yume Menghe Xu, Tufts University

• Brian E. Gravel, Tufts University