Collaborative Research: Research Initiation: Writing Education Initiating Identity Transformation in Engineering Students-The Wri2tes Project

George Washington University, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

This project seeks to better prepare engineers for professional work by understanding how experiences of learning to write in school help develop students' capacities for engineering judgement and their identities as responsible professionals. The engineering disciplines are rigorous in their application of scientific principles, and these principles are directly addressed in undergraduate engineering classrooms. However, engineers are also called to make decisions that implicitly account for complex criteria, including the welfare of those who use or are impacted by the systems they design and the economic needs of their employers. As a result, in many ways engineering is an art that requires practitioners to routinely navigate difficult tradeoffs that require professional judgments. These judgments include often-conflicting economic, ethical, social, and value-based dimensions, requiring engineers to make well-reasoned decisions for the benefit of society. In order to best serve the public, engineers need to communicate their judgments to engineers, non-specialists, clients, and a variety of others. One key goal in all such interactions will be to convey themselves as competent professionals; either as insiders to other engineers, or as authoritative experts to those seeking their advice. The art of engineering, in short, is tightly bound to the negotiation of engineering identity: engineers must be able to practice engineering as art and develop sound judgments that balance complex, competing objectives or constraints, and they must simultaneously convey these judgments in ways that will help them identify-and be recognized as-engineers. Despite this tight connection, however, little work to date has investigated the relationship between the writing engineering students do and the development of engineering identities, particularly in terms of engineering judgment. This project addresses this gap by exploring how students' experiences with writing shape their identification with the engineering profession and the way they convey engineering judgments to better ensure that tomorrow's engineering workforce will best serve the needs of public. To investigate the ways students produce engineer identities in written artifacts through which they expect to be recognized as engineers, the project employs a two-phase qualitative case study; Phase 1 uses semi-structured interviews and analyses of student work to explore engineering identity production in writing, and Phase 2 uses those results to design and study assignments intended to more effectively foster engineering identity production in writing. The study is grounded in Gee's use of identity as an analytic lens, Tonso's identity production theory, and Lea and Street's academic literacy approach. In Phase 1, the case studies will focus on the ways students produce engineer identities through their written projects. Course documents (including assignments and related material) as well as instructors' autoethnographic field notes on implementation will provide contextual data for the case. In Phase 2, the insights from the initial cases will be used to design appropriate teaching tools and approaches. Few studies in engineering identity have investigated the role that navigating difficult tradeoffs in writing plays in students' engineering identity construction. In addition, few investigators have examined the ways in which the artifacts students produce reflect the choices students must negotiate during their professional identity development and production. This study contributes to our knowledge of how a critical professional practice-writing-contributes to the development of students' holistic engineering identities in ways that best prepare them to develop products and systems that meet societies needs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.