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When it comes to engaging with complex, social problems, it is important to be aware of not only what one believes, but also why one believes it. Plus, focusing on beliefs about the cause of a social phenomenon (e.g., what one believes causes inequitable participation of women in engineering) rather than just beliefs about the phenomena itself (e.g., what one believes about the extent to which gender inequity exists in engineering) is an important contribution to broadening participation because one’s causal beliefs relate to their ideas about what needs to happen to make engineering more equitable. In this paper, we describe our use of Thinking as Argument (TaA) as a promising theoretical framework for exploring how engineering educators arrive at their beliefs about the cause of gender-based inequity in engineering. According to TaA, the type of robust argument that is desirable for one to commit to their beliefs about the cause of complex social phenomena includes five distinct components: causal theory, evidence, counterargument, counterevidence, and rebuttal. By conducting interviews about gender-based inequity using TaA, we can explore 1) the ways in which individuals articulate their causal beliefs as arguments of varying sophistication, and 2) the ways in which individuals use evidence to commit to their beliefs. In this contribution, we: describe TaA as a framework, document how we used TaA in a pilot study to inform our ongoing research on engineering faculty’s causal beliefs, and provide initial evidence for TaA theory as a novel methodological contribution for studying beliefs related to equity in engineering. Specifically, our use of TaA revealed that while each participant offered a belief in a system-level cause of gender-based minoritization, there was considerable variation in the ways in which they used evidence to arrive at their beliefs and in their epistemological orientation toward gender-based inequities in engineering. We believe there is value in the use of TaA to study beliefs because ultimately, when we increase our explicit awareness of our commitment to our causal beliefs, we are better able to behave in ways that align with our beliefs and to develop agency to disrupt oppression.
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This content will become publicly available on December 13, 2025
Who is the best engineer?: Identity theory as a framework to reflect on our role in the construction of beliefs about the value of social responsibility in engineering
The 2024 SEFI conference posed the question, “How can we ensure the highest quality of technical competence while at the same time ensuring that social and environmental responsibility is core to the identity of engineering graduates?” Identity formation is a complex process that has been theorized in many ways. In this workshop, I invited participants to consider Holland and colleagues’ theory of identity as a useful framework for reflecting on our how our participation in engineering education contributes to beliefs about what makes a “real” or the “best” engineer. This theory posits that within our classrooms, students are participating in a complex cultural practice through which they ultimately learn to identify (and be identified) as more or less of an engineer than others. Our everyday classroom practices ultimately function to co-construct 1) shared beliefs about what makes a “good” engineer, and 2) everyone’s relative position in a social hierarchy. Furthermore, identify development is theorized to include both social forces (i.e., rules and guidelines that influence how people behave in a social space) and individual agency (i.e., we are not just carbon copies of culture or norms because our actions shape the culture and norms). Understanding identity development as such empowers us to be intentional with our own participation in identity construction by providing theoretical entry points for conveying the value of social responsibility. The usefulness of this particular identity theory to ideate strategies for integrating social responsibility into students’ engineering identities has been corroborated by the empirical findings of our U.S.-based engineering education research. During this workshop, we utilized the theory to draw out existing or future concrete practices that each of us, given our unique global and institutional contexts, are motivated to enact in support of social responsibility as core to engineering. Specifically, our interactions culminated with answering the following question: What is one concrete way I can be intentional in how I participate in identity co-construction? Participant responses to this prompt are presented directly.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1920421
- PAR ID:
- 10605923
- Publisher / Repository:
- SEFI Annual Conference
- Date Published:
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- identity, research-to-practice, cultural construction, values
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Lausanne, Switzerland
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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