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Abstract BackgroundStudents' identification with engineering is intertwined culturally with being smart. Broadly, engineering students are often considered to be smart by others and by themselves, and these beliefs about smartness—what it is and who has enough of it to be an engineer—are a fundamental and limiting aspect of students' experiences. PurposeThe purpose of this study was to explore how undergraduate engineering students describe themselves as smart enough to be engineers. We aimed to develop rich descriptions of the complex ways they articulate their identities as smart before coming to college and during the first two years of their undergraduate degrees. Design/MethodWe collected data through a series of interviews with 25 participants. We iteratively and collaboratively analyzed the data to determine the predominant ways the participants articulated their identities as smart enough to be engineers. We generated a qualitative data display to check for patterns related to pathways into engineering programs and privileged social identities. ResultsWe found that engineering students have three different ways to articulate that they are smart enough to be engineers: (1) they have innate abilities, (2) they are hardworking and dedicated to learning, and (3) they have skills and experience related to engineering. Additionally, we provide qualitative evidence that the innate abilities articulation relates to privilege. Discussion/ConclusionThe study participants engaged in identity work that produced the three articulations. As engineering educators, we need to take responsibility for the ways in which our participation in the cultural practice of smartness reproduces inequity. 

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. 

The notion of being smart is a concept that underpins the culture of engineering classrooms. That said, it is a topic that is not discussed or addressed by educators directly. Through this special session, we aim to give light to the concept of smartness and the problematic and oppressive practices that result from it given the extent literature on the topic including our own research into the domain. With participants, we aim to generate practical approaches to addressing smartness that work in a variety of contexts to broaden participation in engineering via more inclusive classrooms. 

Contribution: This study examined the role of the engineering and smartness identities of three women as they made decisions about their participation in engineering majors. In addressing the under-representation of women in engineering, particularly in electrical engineering and computer science fields where they have been extremely under-represented, it is important to consider engineering identity as it has been shown to be an important component of major selection and persistence. Background: Smartness is inextricably linked to engineering and prior work has shown that identifying as smart is salient to students who choose engineering majors. However, the relative roles of students’ engineering and smartness identities as they relate to academic decision making and persistence in engineering is not well understood. Research Question: How do engineering identity and smartness identity relate to women’s decisions about choosing engineering majors in the instances of joining engineering, changing engineering major, and leaving engineering? Methodology: Data were collected from a series of three interviews with three different women. Data condensation techniques, including writing participant summary memos and analytic memos, focused on detailing participants’ academic decisions, engineering identity, and smartness identity were used for analysis. Data visualization was used to map the women’s engineering identity and smartness identity to their academic decisions related to their majors. Findings: The findings indicate the participants’ smartness identity was salient in the initial decision to matriculate into engineering, both their engineering and smartness identities remained stable as they persisted in or left engineering. And reveal complex interactions between these identities and decision making. 

Common discourse conveys that to be an engineer, one must be “smart.” Our individual and collective beliefs about what constitutes smart behavior are shaped by our participation in the complex cultural practice of smartness. From the literature, we know that the criteria for being considered “smart” in our educational systems are biased. The emphasis on selecting and retaining only those who are deemed “smart enough” to be engineers perpetuates inequity in undergraduate engineering education. Less is known about what undergraduate students explicitly believe are the different ways of being smart in engineering or how those different ways of being a smart engineer are valued in introductory engineering classrooms. In this study, we explored the common beliefs of undergraduate engineering students regarding what it means to be smart in engineering. We also explored how the students personally valued those ways of being smart versus what they perceived as being valued in introductory engineering classrooms. Through our multi-phase, multi-method approach, we initially qualitatively characterized their beliefs into 11 different ways to be smart in engineering, based on a sample of 36 engineering students enrolled in first-year engineering courses. We then employed quantitative methods to uncover significant differences, with a 95% confidence interval, in six of the 11 ways of being smart between the values personally held by engineering students and what they perceived to be valued in their classrooms. Additionally, we qualitatively found that 1) students described grades as central to their classroom experience, 2) students described the classroom as a context where effortless achievement is associated with being smart, and 3) students described a lack of reward in the classroom for showing initiative and for considerations of social impact or helping others. As engineering educators strive to be more inclusive, it is essential to have a clear understanding and reflect on how students value different ways of being smart in engineering as well as consider how these values are embedded into teaching praxis. 

What does it mean to be “smart” in an engineering classroom? How do engineering students make sense of themselves a s smart enough to be engineers? The development of shared beliefs about what it means to be “smart” and where you rank compared to others is a result of smartness as a cultural practice. With the cultural practice framing, smartness i s not a noun – something that someone possesses a certain amount of, but rather it is a verb – something that is actively happening to and with others in context. The interactions between individuals result in shared beliefs about what it means to be smart. Specifically, when we participate in smartness as a cultural practice, we learn what is recognized as smart and our place in the relative hierarchy of smartness. 

Background: Those who participate in engineering are often assumed to be smart by others. At the same time, the cultural construction of what counts as “smart” is biased and therefore functions as a barrier to broadening participation in engineering. While considerable work has been done to understand engineering identity, how students understand themselves as smart is rarely made explicit in engineering identity research. Purpose: This paper is a theoretical discussion which highlights the need for engineering identity research to integrate students’ understanding of themselves as smart. By not incorporating students’ understanding of themselves as smart explicitly in work on engineering identity, we allow the bias in what gets recognized as smart to remain implicit and oppressive. Scope: In this paper, we argue that the idea of smart is very salient in engineering contexts and contributes to inequity. Then, we demonstrate how three different framings of identity allow for the explicit integration of how students are understanding themselves as smart. We also present selected examples from our empirical data to illustrate the concrete ways in which students’ understandings of themselves as smart manifest in an engineering context. Conclusions: We provided explicit opportunities for researchers to integrate students’ understandings of themselves as smart across three different framings of identity and how such understanding has shown up in our empirical research. In doing so, we conclude that making “smart” explicit in engineering identity provides a way to understand the exclusionary nature of engineering, and a new lens to apply when considering efforts to broaden participation in engineering.