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1. Examining How Engineering Educators Produce, Reproduce, or Challenge Meritocracy and Technocracy in Pedagogical Reasoning

   Turpen, Chandra A. ; Radoff, Jennifer ; Gupta, Ayush ; Sabo, Hannah ; Elby, Andrew ( June 2019 , ASEE annual conference & exposition)

   Sociologists and historians of science/engineering have documented the salience of meritocracy and technocracy in engineering and engineering education (Cech, 2014; Slaton, 2015; Riley, 2008). Some engineering education scholars have begun to document how technocracy and meritocracy have been mechanisms of marginalization within engineering education (Slaton, 2015; Foor, Walden, & Trytten, 2007; Secules, Gupta, Elby, & Turpen, 2018). Our team has been engaged in the iterative redesign of a pedagogy seminar for engineering peer educators working within a college-level introduction to engineering design course. Using tools of discourse analysis, we analyze how technocratic stances are reproduced or challenged in engineering peer educators’ talk during pedagogy seminar discussions. We study peer educators, in particular, because they are in a unique position to do harm if the ideologies of meritocracy and technocracy aren't challenged. Likewise, they are in a unique position to do good if they actively disrupt these ideologies in the introductory engineering design course. We present empirical examples of engineering peer educators both reproducing and contesting technocratic (and, at times, meritocratic) stances in reasoning about engineering education. We believe that such empirical examples can help engineering educators hone their attention to student thinking in the classroom and help us understand what it might look like to see evidence of growth in students’ reasoning. 

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2. The Amazon Effect: A Case Study of Corporate Influence on Student Macro-Ethical Reasoning

   Abdurrahman, F. N. ; Chudamani, S. ; Turpen, C. A. ; Radoff, J. ; Elby, A. ; Tomblin, D. ( June 2023 , Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland)

   As the field of engineering faces looming societal issues, it becomes particularly important to foster more “holistic engineers” with systems-thinking skills and an understanding of the macro-ethical impacts of their work (Canny and Bielefeldt, 2015) Macro-ethics here refers to the collective social responsibility of engineers as a profession, as opposed to micro-ethics, which concern activities within the profession (Herkert, 2005). However, college students studying engineering in the United States exhibit a decline in concern for public welfare over the course of their education (Cech, 2014) as well as a tendency to orient to micro-ethical issues over macro-ethical issues (Schiff et al, 2020). Scholars attribute these trends to ideologies pervasive in engineering spaces, such as depoliticization of engineering practice, technocracy, and meritocracy (Cech, 2014; Slaton, 2015). While Cech (2014) argues these status quo ideologies in engineering are maintained by a “culture of disengagement” that decreases interest in public welfare, Radoff et al. (2022) find indications that additional factors contribute to engaged students’ reproduction of such ideologies. They find, for example, instances of students in reproducing dehumanizing narratives regarding low-income communities, despite their enrollment in a voluntary program premised on cultivating socially responsible STEM professionals. This finding suggests that even students who remain “engaged” to some degree can reproduce status quo ideologies which Cech (2014) attributes to disengagement. One explanation as to why a macro-ethically “engaged” student may fail to attend to the social aspects of design follows a deficit narrative: a lack of knowledge or ability. We see this assumption in comparisons of students’ and experts’ design processes, where the areas in which students behave differently than experts are interpreted as areas that require additional instruction on how to behave more like the experts (Atman et al., 2008). This presupposition of students’ lacking knowledge or skills, however, backgrounds contextual or interactional factors. Philip et al. (2018) challenges such assumptions in their analysis of a classroom discussion on the ethics of drone warfare, which exemplifies students’ convergence to American nationalism, but with the framing that this convergence is interactionally created, rather than the result of individual students’ stable, dogmatic beliefs. However, because their analysis is limited to the scope of a single class discussion, the extent to which students’ performance is situated in said class remains unclear. In this paper, we attempt to understand the ways in which students reproduce ideologies dominant in engineering, as well as the situated nature of students’ ideological orientations in collaborative work. We consider a case study focus group from Radoff et al. (2022) where students reasoned through a hypothetical design scenario about a grocery store. We show how, despite many opportunities where problematic status-quo narratives are momentarily challenged, the students generally reject the challenges, not by arguing against them, but by positioning them outside the scope of their work. Further, we show how these moments of rejection are tightly coupled with attempts to emulate the multinational technology company Amazon. Finally, we use additional data to illustrate the situatedness of one student’s performance, and theorize the influence of Amazon as a “strange attractor” in this student’s situated reasoning. 

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3. Successes and Challenges in Supporting Undergraduate Peer Educators to Notice and Respond to Equity Considerations within Design Teams

   Turpen, Chandra ; Gupta, Ayush ; Radoff, Jennifer ; Elby, Andrew ; Sabo, Hannah ; Quan, Gina ( June 2018 , ASEE annual conference & exposition proceedings)

   We describe and analyze our efforts to support Learning Assistants (LAs)—undergraduate peer educators who simultaneously take a 3-credit pedagogy course—in fostering equitable team dynamics and collaboration within a project-based engineering design course. Tonso and others have shown that (a) inequities can “live” in mundane interactions such as those among students within design teams and (b) those inequities both reflect and (re)produce broader cultural patterns and narratives (e.g. Wolfe & Powell, 2009; Tonso, 1996, 2006a, 2006b; McLoughlin, 2005). LAs could be well-positioned to notice and potentially disrupt inequitable patterns of participation within design teams. In this paper, we explore (1) How do LAs notice, diagnose, and consider responding to teamwork troubles within design teams, and (2) What ideological assumptions plausibly contribute to LAs’ sensemaking around their students’ teamwork troubles? To do so, we analyze how the LAs notice and consider responding to issues of equitable teamwork and participation, as exhibited in three related activities: (i) an in-class roleplay, (ii) observing and diagnosing teamwork troubles (TTs) in the engineering design teams, and (iii) imagining possible instructional responses to those troubles, and students’ possible reactions. We articulate three modes of thinking that roughly capture patterns in LAs’ descriptions and diagnoses of, and imagined responses to, the teamwork troubles: individual accountability, where the trouble is seen as caused by individual(s) described as “off task” or “checked out” or demonstrating some level of incompetence; delegation of work, where the trouble was located in the team leader’s inability to delegate tasks effectively to team members, or in the group’s general lack of communication about what tasks need to be completed, who should execute the tasks, and what work other groups in the team were doing; and emergent systems, where trouble was described as a group-level phenomenon emerging from the patterns of interaction amongst group members, contextual features, and larger structural forces. We find that LAs drew on individual accountability and delegation of work to evaluate TTs. Much rarer were ascriptions of TTs to interactional dynamics between teammates. We connected these modes to the underlying ideological assumptions that have consequences for how meritocracy and technocracy (Slaton, 2015; Cech, 2014) play out in an engineering design classroom and serve to ameliorate or reify engineering mindsets (Riley, 2008). The modes are asymmetric, in that emergent systems based interpretations hold more potential for elucidating ongoing social processes, for challenging meritocracy and socio-technical duality, and for seeing power differentials within interpersonal and institutional contexts. We argue for the need to better understand the ideological assumptions underlying how peer-educators—and other instructors—interpret classroom events. 

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4. Examining the “narrow” and “expansive” socio-technical imaginaries influencing college students’ collaborative reasoning about a design scenario

   Radoff, J. ; Turpen, C. ; Abdurrahman, F. ; Chen, D. ; Tomblin, D. ; Agrawal, A. ; Chudamani, S. ( August 2022 , Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN)

   Many studies show that college engineering students’ sense of ethical and social responsibility declines over the course of their college careers (Cech, 2014; Canny & Bielefeldt, 2015; Schiff et al., 2021). One reason is that many college engineering programs and courses reinforce the social-technical dualism, which treats social and macro-ethical issues as distinct from the technical work more often associated with “real” engineering. Some programs, like the Science, Technology and Society (STS) program at [institution made confidential for review], attempt to challenge this dualism by supporting the integration of social and technical considerations within students’ design work and by asking students to grapple with the complex ethics of their work. However, this program is still embedded within a department, university, and society that subscribes to harmful ideologies such as technocracy, capitalism, and meritocracy, which value efficiency, surveillance, and control. These ideologies and their associated values constrain the imagination for what is possible in design work, for instance, by relying on technological ‘quick fixes’ to address complex social problems or by propping up large corporations as innovators, without adequately grappling with the harm that these corporations might be doing. This cultural reality creates an uphill battle for educators attempting to support engineering students’ sense of social consciousness and ethical responsibility. Thus, this study attempts to understand how engineering students’ imaginations are being constrained by societal structures and ideologies and when do they “break free” from these constraints? In this paper, we present a preliminary analysis of first-year STS students collaboratively reasoning through a simulated design scenario about a small community store facing challenges related to the Covid-19 pandemic (adapted from Gupta, 2017). Using discourse and narrative analysis, we analyzed multiple focus group interviews to identify what we call “co-occurrences,” or ideas that tend to hang together in participants’ reasoning. Examining these co-occurrences provides insight into the variety of ways socio-technical imaginaries play out in students’ design thinking. 

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5. Creating Inclusivity in Engineering Teaching and Learning Contexts: Adapting the Aspire Summer Institute Model for Engineering Stakeholders

   Beverly, S. P. ; Gillian-Daniel, D. L. ( June 2023 , 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   There have been many initiatives to improve the experiences of marginalized engineering students in order to increase their desire to pursue the field of engineering. However, despite these efforts, workforce numbers indicate lingering disparities. Representation in the science and engineering workforce is low with women comprising only 16% of those in science and engineering occupations in 2019, and underrepresented minorities (e.g., Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaskan Native) collectively representing only approximately 20% (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics [NCSES], 2022). Additionally, engineering has historically held cultural values that can exclude marginalized populations. Cech (2013) argues that engineering has supported a meritocratic ideology in which intelligence is something that you are born with rather than something you can gain. Engineering, she argues, is riddled with meritocratic regimens that include such common practices as grading on a curve and “weeding” out students in courses.Farrell et al. (2021) discuss how engineering culture is characterized by elitism through practices of epistemological dominance (devaluing other ways of knowing), majorism (placing higher value on STEM over the liberal arts), and technical social dualism (the belief that issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion should not be part of engineering). These ideologies can substantially affect the persistence of both women and people of color–populations historically excluded in engineering, because their concerns and/or cultural backgrounds are not validated by instructors or other peers which reproduces inequality. Improving student-faculty interactions through engineering professional development is one way to counteract these harmful cultural ideologies to positively impact and increase the participation of marginalized engineering students. STEM reform initiatives focused on faculty professional development, such as the NSF INCLUDES Aspire Alliance (Aspire), seek to prepare and educate faculty to integrate inclusive practices across their various campus roles and responsibilities as they relate to teaching, advising, research mentoring, collegiality, and leadership. The Aspire Summer Institute (ASI) has been one of Aspire’s most successful programs. The ASI is an intensive, week-long professional development event focused on educating institutional teams on the Inclusive Professional Framework (IPF) and how to integrate its components, individually and as teams, to improve STEM faculty inclusive behaviors. The IPF includes the domains of identity, intercultural awareness, and relational skill-building (Gillian-Daniel et al., 2021). Identity involves understanding not only your personal cultural identity but that of students and the impact of identity in learning spaces. Intercultural awareness involves instructors being able to navigate cultural interactions in a positive way as they consider the diverse backgrounds of students, while recognizing their own privileges and biases. Relational involves creating trusting relationships and a positive communication flow between instructors and students. The ASI and IPF can be used to advance a more inclusive environment for marginalized students in engineering. In this paper, we discuss the success of the ASI and how the institute and the IPF could be adapted specifically to support engineering faculty in their teaching, mentoring, and advising. 

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