2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Marginalizing narratives in engineering (e.g. engineering is masculine, competitive, etc.) can have a significant impact on students’ creativity, success, and belonging. While studies show that student shifting narratives about their relationships to engineering can support their persistence through these marginalizations, there is a lack of investigation into how engineering learning environments can be designed to facilitate student’s (re)negotiation to expand their agency.

In this study, we present a case where Sarah, a mechanical engineering undergraduate student, (re)negotiated her relationships with engineering through a university course focused on how people learn in different engagements with making. In the reflective journals Sarah submitted during the course, she surfaced a tension she felt between her prior experiences with making and her emerging experiences in a college-level engineering program. Since childhood, making and engineering has always been playful and oriented around conversations with materials. However, coming to engineering school, Sarah felt hesitant to engage in making for fear of being judged by her peers and professors, and developed uncertainty towards her decision of majoring in engineering. Through making activities in the course designed to support students reflecting on and (re)negotiating their relationships to learning, Sarah came to a conclusion at the end of the course that making and engineering is more about her learning process rather than how impressive the final product is to other people.

Observing these shifts in Sarah’s relationships with engineering, we ask:
How did the activities in the course support Sarah’s (re)negotiation of her relationships with engineering?
How can educators support engineering students’ (re)negotiation of their disciplinary relationships?

We conduct narrative inquiry and interaction analysis on data including classroom video recordings, semi-structured interviews, students' reflective journals, students' artifacts, and fieldnotes. We explore specific activities where Sarah’s reflections reveal an active and persistent negotiation of her practice-linked identities and the various contexts of making/engineering she experienced in her past and in her current life as an engineering student. Drawing from theories in expansive learning, materiality and critical self-reflection, we account for how the materiality, social and intrapersonal of making prompted her reflection, and how the expansive framing of making and engineering throughout the course supported her to see everyday practice contributing to engineering practice. We discuss the implications of how educators can use making as an activity to design learning environments that support engineering students’ (re)negotiation with their disciplinary relationships.