Language and disciplinary literacies for accessing, learning and communicating meaning: students’ experiences of the transition from school to first-year undergraduate engineering

ABSTRACT

Language use is central for accessing, learning, and communicating understanding of undergraduate engineering knowledge. There is a need to understand students’ experiences, interpretations, and expectations of language use – conceptualised as related notions of language and disciplinary literacies – in their transition from school to and through first-year university. We use interviews with nine first-year mechanical engineering students to describe this transition as a to-and-fro process of navigating a continuum of complexity. All students experienced this as a process of uncritical socialisation into undergraduate engineering. Yet navigating this continuum was harder for some, a process that was inflected through their language repertoires and schooling experiences, but also agentive and personal. Students identified an absence of opportunities to bring their knowledges, languages and identities to this process. These findings and our conceptual tools have purchase in wider debates concerned with the transition into engineering programmes in which diversity is increasingly the norm.

KEYWORDS:

• Disciplinary literacies
• education development
• first-year students
• language
• school-university transition
• undergraduate engineering

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Sensitive to the difficulty of representing the vastness and complexity of any context, without essentialising (Chisholm 2012; Christie 2020), we draw on published scholarship for our contextual descriptions.

2 We recruit the notion continuum of complexity from its use by Planas, Morgan, and Schütte (2018) in their description of research on language and mathematics.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Cape Town.

Notes on contributors

Kate le Roux

Kate le Roux is Associate Professor in Language Development in the Centre for Higher Education Development, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research is located at the intersection of language, mathematics and the learning of disciplinary knowledge in engineering and science. This focuses on equity, power and identity. She draws theoretically from critical linguistics, mathematics education within the sociopolitical, multilingualism and multimodality for learning, and Southern Theory. She was a 2014 Mandela Mellon Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, and is a past Director of the Centre for Research in Engineering Education (CREE) at the University of Cape Town.

Malebogo Ngoepe

Malebogo Ngoepe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cape Town. Her research interests focus largely on the application of mechanics to biomedical problems, including thrombosis, congenital heart disease and curly human scalp hair. She has a growing interest in shaping learning spaces that recognise and value the resources and contributions of all our students.

Corrinne Shaw

Corrinne Shaw is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cape Town and Deputy Director of the Centre for Research in Engineering Education (CREE). Her primary research activities encompass three areas related to transitions, firstly, the transition between professional practice and academic practice; the transition from university to professional practice; and the transition from school to university. These areas of research are concerned with transformative learning. For example, becoming an engineer through the translation of academic engineering knowledge to professional knowledge requires transformations that involves identity shifts. Her research contributes knowledge and understanding of how these transformations are effected and consequently informs recommendations for learning design for access and success in academic and professional practice.

Brandon Ian Collier-Reed

Brandon Ian Collier-Reed is Professor and Head of Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cape Town. He is a past President of the South African Society of Engineering Education, a Fellow of the South African Institution of Mechanical Engineering and a past Director of the Centre for Research in Engineering Education. He is a registered Professional Mechanical Engineer with the Engineering Council of South Africa. His research focusses on student engagement – with a specific interest in understanding how the student experience is impacted by the use of technology in teaching and learning. He has a long-standing interest in the nature of technology and technological literacy, particularly in relation to students entering higher education.