Search for: All records

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.