Making the Familiar Strange: An Ethnographic Scholarship of Integration Contextualizing Engineering Educational Culture as Masculine and Competitive

Abstract

This paper emerges out of ethnographic scholarship on marginalization in present-day engineering education. I pursue a scholarship of integration to contextualize my own and others’ engineering education research with critical, cultural, and historical accounts of engineering. I structure the narrative around the ethnographic themes of masculinity, competition, and competition-as-masculinity. Within each theme I situate present-day ethnographic observations of engineering educational culture, elaborate on those observations with historical context, and return to consider how historical context extends the original ethnographic observations. The implications for the study are threefold: (1) generating a new functional lens on engineering educational culture as masculine and competitive, (2) communicating useful historical context to stakeholders in engineering education, and (3) demonstrating the value of integrative scholarship to promote further interdisciplinary collaboration.

KEYWORDS:

• History
• culture
• gender
• marginalization
• diversity
• competition

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge his dissertation committee (Ayush Gupta, Andy Elby, Janet Walkoe, and Dan Levin) and the University of Maryland Engineering Education Research Group (including Gina Quan, Katey Shirey, and Kevin Calabro) for feedback on prior drafts of this article. Valuable conversations with Amy Slaton, Alice Pawley, and Thurka Sangaramoorthy helped him consider different literature and framings that added substantially to this paper. Portions of the intellectual work to produce this paper were supported by a graduate assistantship from National Science Foundation Grant No. DUE-1245745. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Portions of the work were also supported by a Dissertation Seed Grant from the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity at UMD and a Support Program for Advancing Research and Collaboration (SPARC) grant from the UMD College of Education. Rewriting and editing were also conducted while at the Engineering Education Transformations Institute at the University of Georgia and the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University while in visiting faculty roles. The Engineering Studies reviewing and editorial personnel provided extremely thorough and conscientious feedback during this process of interdisciplinary translation, and the work has been improved substantially through that feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Stephen Secules http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3149-2306

Notes

1 Secules et al., “Zooming Out from the Struggling Individual Student.”

2 McDermott and Varenne, “Reconstructing Culture in Educational Research.” Although McDermott and Varenne rarely took up the identifier ‘critical’, I note that the selection of educational facts are those pertaining to marginalization and social justice, similar to a critical theory perspective. For example, that a student is ‘Learning Disabled’, McDermott, “The Acquisition of a Child by a Learning Disability.”

3 In an example of historical archaelogical forgery McDermott and Varenne, “Reconstructing Culture in Educational Research,” 12; e.g. in the changing definitions of ‘genius’ McDermott, “Materials for a Confrontation with Genius as a Personal Identity.”

4 Rockwell, “Recovering History in the Anthropology of Education.”

5 “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”

6 “The Making of Nonscientists and Not-Yet-Citizens.”

7 Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered.

8 Cronin, “Transdisciplinary Scholarship”; and Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered, 14.

9 Solis et al., “Towards a Scholarship of Integration.”

10 Ibid.

11 Pascoe, Dude You’re a Fag.

12 Secules et al., “Zooming Out from the Struggling Individual Student.”

13 I observed a similar process to what Tonso observed regarding how teamwork marginalized and discounted the significant contributions of female students on mixed gender teams. “Student Learning and Gender.”

14 Blair et al., “Undergraduate STEM Instructors’ Teacher Identities and Discourses”; Beddoes, “Feminist Scholarship in Engineering Education”; and Beddoes, “Feminist Methodologies and Engineering Education Research.”

15 Pawley, “Shifting the ‘Default’”; and Beddoes, “Agnotology, Gender, and Engineering.”

16 Robbins, “The Reflexive Engineer.”

17 Riley, “Eng. Soc. Justice”; and Blair et al., “Undergraduate STEM Instructors’ Teacher Identities and Discourses.”

18 Engineering and drone warfare, Gupta, “How Engineering Students Think About the Roles and Responsibilities”; e.g.capitalism and US slavery, Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told.

19 Blair et al., “Undergraduate STEM Instructors’ Teacher Identities and Discourses.”

20 Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine, 18.

21 Lucena, “Making Women and Minorities in Science and Enginering.”

22 Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity.

23 Stevens et al., “Becoming an Engineer.”

24 Foucault, “The Subject and Power.”

25 Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine.

26 Pawley, “What Counts as ‘Engineering’”; and Thomson, Crousing Boundaries.

27 Oldenziel, “Introduction.”

28 Gooday, “Liars, Experts and Authorities.”

29 Zussman, Mechanics of the Middle Class; Alder, Engineering the Revolution; and Miller, “Pathways and Purposes of the ‘French Tradition’ of Engineering in Antebellum America.”

30 Miller, “Pathways and Purposes of the ‘French Tradition’ of Engineering in Antebellum America.”

31 Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine; Zussman, Mechanics of the Middle Class.

32 Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine; Wajcman, “Technocapitalism Meets Technofeminism”; and Miller, “Pathways and Purposes of the ‘French Tradition’ of Engineering in Antebellum America.”

33 Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness.

34 Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine.

35 Frehill, “The Gendered Construction of the Engineering Profession.”

36 Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine.

37 Pawley, “What Counts as ‘Engineering’”; and Bix, “Equipped for Life.”

38 Bix, “From ‘Engineeresses’ to ‘Girl Engineers’ to ‘Good Engineers’.”

39 Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine, 75.

40 Slaton, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in US Engineering.

41 Alexander, The New Jim Crow.

42 Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name.

43 Myers and Massey, “Race, Labor, and Punishment in Postbellum Georgia.” The last prison mines were finally outlawed by FDR in the 1940s directly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and Carnegie’s famous US Steel corporation was implicated in profiting from the prison leasing process (Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name).

44 Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name.

45 Ashcraft and Mumby, Reworking Gender.

46 Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity.

47 Secules et al., “Zooming Out from the Struggling Individual Student.”

48 Ibid., 63.

49 Ibid.

50 Kohn, No Contest.

51 And Varenne and McDermott, Successful Failure, e.g. the ‘kill thy neighbor’ game.

52 Sochacka et al., “Stories ‘Told’ About Engineering in the Media.”

53 ASEE Task Force, “A National Action Agenda for Engineering Education,” 7.

54 National Academy of Engineering, The Engineer of 2020, 41.

55 Lucena, Defending the Nation; and Deboer, A History of Ideas in Science Education.

56 Todd, Sorensen, and Magleby, “Designing a Senior Capstone Course”; and Dutson et al., “A Review of Literature on Teaching Engineering Design.”

57 Frey, Smith, and Bellinger, “Using Hands-On Design Challenges,” 487.

58 Crawley et al., Rethinking Engineering Education.

59 Ibid., 102.

60 Ibid., 102.

61 Seely, “The Other Re-Engineering of Engineering Education, 1900–1965.”

62 Ibid.

63 Prince, “Does Active Learning Work?”

64 Erbil and Dogan, “Collaboration within Student Design Teams.”

65 Bazylev et al., “Participation in Robotics Competition as Motivation.”

66 Foor, Walden, and Trytten, “‘I Wish That I Belonged More in This Whole Engineering Group’”; and Seymour and Hewitt, Talking About Leaving.

67 Blair et al., “Undergraduate STEM Instructors’ Teacher Identities and Discourses.”

68 Secules and Turpen, “The Construction of Competitive White Masculinity.”

69 Voyles, Fossum, and Haller, “Teachers Respond Functionally to Student Gender Differences.”

70 Tonso, “Student Engineers and Engineer Identity.”

71 Secules et al., “Zooming Out from the Struggling Individual Student.”

72 “Undergraduate STEM Instructors’ Teacher Identities and Discourses,” 34.

73 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”; and Noble, A World Without Women.

74 “Technocapitalism Meets Technofeminism.”

75 McDermott and Varenne, “Culture ‘as’ Disability.”

76 McDermott and Varenne, 328.

77 Bird, “Welcome to the Men’s Club”; Lipman-Blumen, “Toward a Homosocial Theory of Sex Roles”; and Faulkner, “The Power and the Pleasure?”

78 Ashcraft and Mumby, Reworking Gender, 3.

79 Faulkner, “The Power and the Pleasure?”; and Seron et al., “Persistence Is Cultural.”

80 Ensmenger, “Making Programming Masculine.”

81 Acker, Gendered Education.

82 Secules et al., “Zooming Out from the Struggling Individual Student.”

83 Pawley, “Shifting the ‘Default’.”

84 Wisnioski, “What’s the Use?”