Abstract: This paper works toward two goals. The first is to build on our previous work on “becoming an engineer”, in which we have attempted to understand engineering learning within a broader framework that focuses not only on the development of knowledge or cognitive capacities, but also on additional dimensions, including the development of identities within social and organizational contexts. We aim to further explore how, through their participation in the routine practices of the undergraduate curriculum, students make themselves, and are made by others, into engineers. The specific focus here is on how a particular “ideology of engineering” is reflected in the discourse of participants in presentations for a first year projects course. In particular, this paper details how engineering discourses serve to depoliticize complex social issues, and to reframe them as technical issues that can be resolved through design and refinement of innovative technologies. A second and related goal is to contribute to recent methodological discussions in engineering education, and specifically to introduce the methodological approach of Mediated Discourse Analysis (MDA) as a way of exploring processes of becoming an engineer. MDA is a promising methodology for such work, in that it focuses on well-chosen instances of action in order to keep in sight both broad social issues and the local actions and interactions that bring these broader issues to life, in the process reproducing and potentially transforming existing systems. In so doing, MDA holds potential for developing a framework for interrogating and reformulating the discourses, and their attendant ideologies, that govern everyday practice in engineering education contexts, and for understanding and perhaps changing what it means to become an engineer.
O’Connor, K., Lauff, C., Kotys-Schwartz, D., Rentschler, M.E., “Learning and Identity at the Nexus of Practice: Mediated Discourse Analysis as a Methodology for Engineering Education Research,” ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Seattle, WA, June, 2015.