‘We are not going to educate people’: how students negotiate engineering identities during collaborative problem solving

ABSTRACT

Professional identity development is central to engineering education and has been an important focus of design for learning. However, little is known about how learners develop different aspects of engineering identity in response to the constraints and enablements of their learning environment. The purpose of this paper is to propose an analytical approach for the exploration of how the learning environment facilitates engineering professional identity practices. We illustrate the application of the Implied Identity approach by looking at a group of four engineering students working collaboratively on a task about sustainability. We apply conversation analysis for an in-depth investigation of students’ talk to explore how engineering identities are negotiated. Results show that the group’s collaborative processes involve their identification with the engineering profession by excluding aspects of other professions from the (professional) self. This process is mediated by implied identities that are negotiated by participants. Applying this approach enables one to investigate the interplay between learner and learning environment and highlights the role of individuals’ agency in relation to the contextual effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaboration
• engineering education
• implied identity
• professional identity

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the anonymous participants and our colleagues at the Centre for Research on Learning and Innovation, The University of Sydney: Professor Peter Goodyear, Dr. David Ashe, and Martin Parisio, for their assistance with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maryam Khosronejad

Maryam Khosronejad has a PhD in Education from the Centre for Research on Learning and Innovation, Sydney School of Education and Social Work, the University of Sydney. Her research interests are : (1) professional development, predominantly concerned with engineering education and teacher education; (2) ICT-enhanced learning environments; and (3) educational theory.

Peter Reimann

Peter Reimann is a professor in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work, and a co-director of the Centre for Research on Learning & Innovation, the University of Sydney. His primary research areas are cognitive learning research with a focus on educational computing, multimedia-based and knowledge-based learning environments, e-learning, and the development of evaluation and assessment methods for the effectiveness of computer-based technologies.

Lina Markauskaite

Lina Markauskaite is a professor of the Learning Sciences and co-director of the Centre for Research on Learning and Innovation, the University of Sydney. Her current research spans three related areas: (1) students and teachers’ ICT capabilities; (2) professional learning for complex professional knowledge work; and (3) ICT-enhanced interdisciplinary research methods.