2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Teamwork is a crucial component in engineering education due to the collaborative nature of the field (Cross and Cross, 1996). Although students are expected to work together, how they interact with each other can marginalize or center the role of certain team members. How team members encourage or discourage participation can heavily influence a student’s sense of belonging in the field, thereby influencing their opportunities to learn (Secules et al., 2018). This work-in-progress paper aims to characterize how different kinds of student discourse moves serve to influence the level of inclusion or marginalization in student teamwork at a moment-to-moment grain size. We are guided by the following research question: In what ways does engineering student talk communicate inclusion or exclusion of other students’ ideas?

Prior work has been done exploring marginalization in classroom groups such as looking into different forms of microaggression (Sue et al., 2007) and studying microinterventions consisting of inclusive moves (Cohen and Loten, 2014; Michaels and O’Connor, 2015). For this study, we use Hall et. al (1994)’s definition of marginalization as “the process through which persons are peripheralized on the basis of their identities, associations, experiences, and environments” (p. 25). To define inclusion in the engineering homework talk context, we are guided by Kittleson and Southerland (2004)’s definition for collaboration as “an active give-and-take of ideas between persons rather than one person’s passively learning from the other” (p. 268). This project focuses on undergraduate engineering class conversations, combining researchers’ qualitative discourse analysis of student talk transcripts.

The goal is to develop a new approach to detect marginalizing and inclusive talk within student engineering team discourse. Within the scope of this work-in-progress study, we looked at a subset of six discussion transcripts and used discourse analysis techniques (Brown et. Al., 1983) to dissect the transcripts for moves that had the potential to either include or marginalize other students. For future work, the authors wish to further explore two additional research questions: (1) Are there patterns of inclusive moves that cue a minimally participating student to share an idea? (2) Do conversations with more equal participation across students have different talk move patterns than less equal conversations?