2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Constructive alignment is a promising and popular pedagogical tool, resulting in considerable improvements in learning for relatively little instructor effort compared to other pedagogies. Its use is extensive and it has promising implications for improving engineering education, but the original model of constructive alignment does not consider marginalization or related issues such as sexism or racism. Therefore, constructive alignment may have the potential to preserve and propagate the mechanisms of marginalization, and it is critical to examine this concept and its applications for the potential to preserve and strengthen marginalizing processes.

The research question is, is there potential for marginalizing biases to be present in the concept of constructive alignment and its applications? This paper presents a critical examination of select literature on constructive alignment. The foundational works of Biggs and Cohen in developing constructive alignment are evaluated for marginalizing concepts and processes, as well as the widely-cited update to the model presented by Biggs, Tang and Kennedy. The results of a structured literature review on constructive alignment and marginalization are then presented, and the findings are discussed.

The paper concludes that, while marginalization is not explicitly encoded into the concept of constructive alignment, considerations of issues such as sexism, racism, privilege, and oppression are largely absent from the major works popularizing the concept. A subsequent literature review shows these considerations have largely, although not entirely, been excluded from subsequent applications of constructive alignment, allowing for reification of discriminatory educational practices. Compared to the large body of literature on constructive alignment, there is very little work on the interaction of constructive alignment with marginalization. The case of the technology gap is identified as an explicit example of how marginalization can erode the efficacy of constructively aligned education, results in inequitable student outcomes. Constructive alignment is a fundamentally subjective and qualitative pedagogy that heavily relies on the skills and professionalism of practitioners for its success, and the absence of explicit guidelines on marginalization opens the door for potential biases and discriminating attitudes of facilitators to negatively affect the education of equity-deserving engineering students. The absence of such guidelines is especially critical in engineering education, a fundamentally social profession that holds safeguarding public welfare as its highest principle, and may interact with the phenomenon of the technology gap to produce marginalization in the highly technology-dependent discipline of engineering education. Therefore, there is a need for an evaluation of how extensive the impact of marginalization on applications of constructive alignment has been, and subsequently the development of an updated model of constructive alignment that addresses issues of marginalization.