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Sociologists and historians of science have documented the salience of meritocracy and technocracy in engineering (Cech, 2014; Slaton, 2015; Riley, 2008). Meritocracy is often paired with a technocratic ideology, which distinguishes technical and “soft” skills and assigns more worth to the technical. Scholars have shown how technocracy and meritocracy contribute to marginalization within engineering education (Slaton, 2015; Foor et al., 2007; Secules et al., 2018). Our team has been iteratively redesigning a pedagogy seminar for engineering peer educators to disrupt such forces of marginalization. We study peer educators because they can do harm if these ideologies aren't challenged, and they have the potential to disrupt these ideologies. Using tools from discourse analysis and the ideology-in-pieces framework (Philip, 2011), we analyze how technocratic stances are reproduced or challenged in engineering peer educators’ talk. Such analyses can help others to recognize technocratic reasoning and see some of its negative consequences. 

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. 

Learning Assistants (LAs) are peer-educators in undergraduate courses who take a pedagogy seminar concurrently with teaching. In our Learning Assistant pedagogy course, we engaged LAs in roleplaying interactions between a quiet student, an overbearing student, and an LA. Afterwards, the whole class discussed the roleplay activity. Drawing on tools from discourse analysis, we attend to how roleplay actors navigate speech, turns-of-talk, and physical orientation. We show that the LA playing the role of the overbearing student, drawing on his emotionally-charged embodied experience in the roleplay, articulated insights about how the coupling of linguistic, metalinguistic, and emotional qualities in those interactions affected the power dynamics and emotions embedded in interactions. 

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.