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Ideologies of depoliticization in engineering education: A Mediated Discourse Analysis of student presentations in a first year projects course

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Paper ID #13357
Ideologies of depoliticization in engineering education: A Mediated Discourse
Analysis of student presentations in a first year projects course
Kevin O’Connor, University of Colorado Boulder
Kevin O’Connor is assistant professor of Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences at the University
of Colorado Boulder. His scholarship focuses on human action, communication, and learning as socio-
culturally organized phenomena. A major strand of his research explores the varied trajectories taken by
students as they attempt to enter professional disciplines such as engineering, and focuses on the dilem-
mas encountered by students as they move through these institutionalized trajectories. He is co-editor of
a 2010 National Society for the Study of Education Yearbook, Learning Research as a Human Science.
Other work has appeared in Linguistics and Education; Mind, Culture, and Activity; Anthropology &
Education Quarterly, the Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science; the Journal of Engineering Education; and
the Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research. His teaching interests include develop-
mental psychology; sociocultural theories of communication, learning, and identity; qualitative methods;
and discourse analysis.
Frederick A. Peck, University of Colorado
Frederick Peck is a PhD Candidate in the School of Education at the University of Colorado.
Julie Cafarella, University of Colorado, Boulder
Julie Cafarella is a PhD student in Educational Psychology & Learning Sciences at the University of
Colorado, Boulder. Before moving to Colorado, she worked as a public school teacher in New England.
Her current research focuses on issues of access and equity in STEM education.
Carlye Anne Lauff, University of Colorado, Boulder
Carlye is a 2nd year PhD student in Mechanical Engineering with a concentration in Design. She is
originally from Pittsburgh, PA and received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Pennsylvania
State University. At the University of Colorado Boulder, she is advised by Dr. Mark Rentschler and
co-advised by Dr. Daria Kotys-Schwartz. For the past two years, she has worked as a Graduate Research
Assistant on the NSF-funded project entitled ”Cognitive Ethnographies of Engineering Design. In this
project, she is studying how design in constructed in different environments to better understand what is
needed to ensure successful design projects.
Dr. Daria A Kotys-Schwartz, University of Colorado Boulder
Daria Kotys-Schwartz is the Director of the Idea Forge—a flexible, cross-disciplinary design space at
University of Colorado Boulder. She is also the Design Center Colorado Director of Undergraduate Pro-
grams and a Senior Instructor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She received B.S. and M.S
degrees in mechanical engineering from The Ohio State University and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering
from the University of Colorado Boulder. Kotys-Schwartz has focused her research in engineering stu-
dent learning, retention, and student identity development within the context of engineering design. She
is currently investigating the impact of cultural norms in an engineering classroom context, performing
comparative studies between engineering education and professional design practices, examining holistic
approaches to student retention, and exploring informal learning in engineering education.
Prof. Mark Rentschler, University of Colorado at Boulder
Mark Rentschler received an M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Cambridge, MA, in 2003, where he was a National Defense Science and Engineer-
ing Graduate (NDSEG) Fellow, and a Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of
Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, in 2006. He is currently an Assistant Professor and Design Center Colorado
Founder/Director of Graduate Programs in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado in Boul-
der, CO. He also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Surgery and an affiliate position
c
American Society for Engineering Education, 2015
Paper ID #13357
in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora,
CO. Prior to joining the University of Colorado in 2008, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Division
of Vascular Surgery at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE, and Senior Engineer and
Director of Operations at Virtual Incision Corporation, Boston, MA. His research is focused on medical
device and surgical tool design, tissue mechanics characterization and dynamic contact modeling, robotics
and mechatronics, and mechanical design education,.
Dr. Jenna McWilliams, University of Colorado, Boulder
Jacob (Jenna) McWilliams is a postdoctoral researcher in the Learning Sciences program at the University
of Colorado Boulder. Jacob’s research focuses on issues of gender and sexual diversity in education, and
recent work involves developing queer pedagogies for supporting new media literacies practices in the
elementary classroom and, most recently, drawing on queer and transgender theory for understanding the
dominant discourses of engineering education and how those discourses marginalize and exclude people
from traditionally vulnerable gender, sexual, and ethnic groups.
c
American Society for Engineering Education, 2015
Ideologies of depoliticization in engineering education:
A Mediated Discourse Analysis of student presentations
in a first year projects course
Ideologies of depoliticization in engineering education:
A Mediated Discourse Analysis of student presentations
in a first year projects course
1. Introduction
This paper works toward two goals. The first is to build on our previous work on
“becoming an engineer”,1 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”2 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 education3, 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.
2. Engineering as a Culture and the Ideology of Depoliticization
A number of authors have argued for the value of understanding the discipline and
profession of engineering as a culture4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Cech,2 expressing this perspective,
writes:
Engineering, like other professions, is not just a collection of knowledge, skills,
and practices grouped into a set of jobs. Professions have rich and historically-
rooted cultures that are built into and around their knowledge, skills, and
practices. Professional cultures are the sets of beliefs, myths, and rituals that give
meaning to the intellectual content and practices of a profession. (p. 69)
Cech goes on to argue that integral to engineering culture are its “cultural ideologies,”
that is, “ways of understanding society and engineers’ roles and responsibilities therein,”
including “how engineers understand their own work, their responsibility to the broader
society, and what counts as ‘engineering work’ and what is superfluous to that work” (p.
69). For Cech, understanding engineering as a culture with ideological presuppositions
and commitments has important implications for how we understand engineering
education:
Those who wish to participate in the engineering profession must not only learn
the proper skills and competencies required of practice in the field, they must
learn to “fit in” with the culture of engineering by adhering to these ideologies …
The most concentrated presentation of professional culture is through professional
socialization—the training process by which students move from being neophytes
to professionals … By taking classes, working in labs, engaging in design teams,
and struggling through homework assignments, engineering students not only
learn thermodynamics and circuits, they also learn to become a part of this
culture. (p. 69)
Cech describes two interrelated ideologies of engineering, which she calls the ideologies
of “meritocracy” and of “depoliticization.” It is the latter, the ideology of
depoliticization, that will be of primary concern in this paper.
By “ideology of politicization,” Cech means “the belief that engineering work, by
definition, should disconnect itself from social and cultural realms because such realms
taint otherwise pure engineering design methodologies” (p. 71). This ideology is related
to a set of commitments that maintain that engineering is a “purely ‘technical’ domain,
and thus asocial and apolitical,” that “science and engineering work can be separated
from messy ‘social’ concerns” provided that proper “objective” methodologies of inquiry
and design are followed, and that, as “presumed ‘neutral’ actors, engineers defer to the
objectivity and value neutrality that are assumed to be part of these methods” (pp. 70-71).
That these are ideological commitments has been made clear by decades of research in
Social Studies of Science and Technology, which has shown that “even the most
seemingly objective and neutral realms of engineering practice and design have built into
them social norms, culturally-informed judgments about what counts as ‘truth’; and
ideologically-infused processes of problem definition and solution” (p. 71). This work
has demonstrated that, regardless of the effectiveness of the methodologies of science and
engineering in producing knowledge and technologies, the work that produces these are
always imbued with social values, and are hence ideological.
This ubiquity of the ideology of depoliticization suggests that its effects on students are
likely to be found even in seemingly mundane aspects of engineering education practice;
indeed, these mundane aspects are likely to be a powerful part of the socialization process
because they are seen as normal and unremarkable. Our aim in this paper is to examine a
central but seemingly non-ideological practice—student presentations—in order to see
whether and how the ideology of depoliticization appears.
3. Theoretical Perspective
Our theoretical framework in this paper is the perspective of Mediated Discourse
Analysis (MDA), which is rooted in neo-Vygotskian theories of mind and action, and
particularly in Mediated Action (MA) theory10, 11. A central claim in Vygotsky’s theory
of mental development was that humans make use of semiotic and material artifacts that
mediate and regulate action and interaction. According to this perspective, these
“mediational means” or “cultural tools”10 do not merely facilitate already existing mental
processes; instead they are taken to fundamentally shape and transform the possibilities
for thinking and action.
This mediated nature of mental functioning entails different approaches to their
investigation from the ones that have been typical of much psychology. Most often
psychology has attempted to study memory, problem-solving, and the like by
decontextualizing them from the purportedly messy and uncontrolled conditions of
action. In contrast, MA maintains that mental functioning cannot be studied apart from
the forms of mediation that partly constitute it. Scribner12, on the basis of her studies of
practical problem-solving in workplaces, developed this point with respect to problem-
solving. She argued that the environment, through the ways in which it mediates thinking
in the course of activity, plays a “constitutive role” in cognition: “skilled practical
thinking incorporates features of the task environment (people, things, information) into
the problem-solving system. It is as valid to describe the environment as part of the
problem-solving system as it is to observe that problem-solving occurs ‘in’ the
environment” (p. 329). This inseparability of mental functioning, action, and context is a
fundamental tenet of neo-Vygotskian approaches.
Wertsch, following upon the central role of mediation for Vygotsky, has developed a
theory of what he calls mediated action. This approach, like other contemporary
approaches, aims to go beyond a primary focus on mental functioning in order to
“explicate the relationships between human action … and the cultural, institutional, and
historical contexts in which this action occurs”10, p. 24. MA theory is concerned with
moving beyond the isolated individual as a unit of analysis for social and psychological
research and toward a relational unit of analysis. For Wertsch, this leads to a focus on
“individuals-operating-with-mediational-means” as a unit that is irreducible while still
allowing for analysis of its elements. MA theory is concerned with the tensions involved
when individuals, each with their own histories of participation, engage in action using
mediational means, which afford certain kinds of action while constraining others, and
which have become historically associated with broader systems of relations. In this way
action is located within historically situated, multiple, and often conflicting “chains” of
action or communication, and is oriented to other participants in those chains. According
to this perspective, action is the site at which “constancy and systematicity enter in
contact and struggle with unique, situated performance”13, p. 50. By starting from action,
mediated action theory aims to examine relevant aspects of their sociocultural and
historical situatedness while remaining open to unexpected links that might be revealed
through the analysis.
The MA perspective has subsequently been developed into an approach called Mediated
Discourse Analysis (MDA)14, which combines the emphases of mediated action theory
with techniques and concepts from social practice theory, critical discourse analysis,
interactional sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology. MDA posits four kinds of
entities that come together in an instance of action, or what Scollon calls “the nexus of
practice”14. The first is the meditational means used to carry out the action. These
mediational means or cultural tools can be either semiotic—language, mathematical
notation, illustrations or sketches, and the like—or material—computers, laser cutters,
markers and paper, tables, rooms, etc. Central to the perspective is that there is no action
that is not mediated by semiotic or material tools (or, most typically, by
both). Methodologically, the task is to identify mediational means that are central to the
specific forms of action that are to be investigated. The second entity that meets at the
nexus of practice is the sociohistorical institutions and discourses that constrain the
action. Institutions can be relatively local—for example, the specific project based
learning lab at the specific institution that we studied—or broader—for example, higher
education, the discipline of engineering, and the like. “Discourses,” as meant here,
include general and identifiable constellations of talk and action. For example, there is a
discourse of engineering design, a discourse of student parties, and a discourse of
instructor meetings. The third entity that meets at the nexus of practice is the
interactional organization that regulates the encounter in which the action takes place.
There are typified forms of organization that characterize, for example, course lectures,
student group work, and student presentations. Each of these are identifiable as routines,
even while each instance of interactional organization is different. The fourth entity that
meets at the nexus of practice is the individual histories and biographical trajectories of
the actors involved in the action. Each of the actors involved in an instance of action
brings their own histories of experience with them, some shared and some unique, and
this matters for understanding how a specific action unfolds.
4. Research Context and Methods
In this paper, we illustrate the use of the MDA framework by examining how first year
students frame their projects in presentations of their design work in an engineering
projects course. We will argue that a mundane and seemingly minor example of project
definition is representative of a pattern of developing engineers who treat social problems
as abstract, technical challenges at the expense of a more humane treatment of those
implicated in their designs. This is true even in project classes, which at the freshman
level are designed to be less technical, less focused on content-knowledge, and more
focused on developing innovative solutions to thorny issues. Since project-based courses
such as Public University’s Freshman Projects class are intentionally designed as
retention tools, it becomes worth considering how the discourses emphasized in these
classes shape the engineers who have passed through them and remain identified with
engineering.
Mediated Discourse Analysis was chosen as the methodological framework because it
provides guidance on investigating how cultural tools and discourses shape, or mediate,
activity in a given context; this is especially useful in engineering education, which has
yet to develop a rigorous framework for understanding how the tools, materials, and
valued ways of thinking and speaking produce new engineers. Additionally, many have
called for an increase focus in engineering education on critical, qualitative approaches to
analysis of engineering contexts15, 16, and MDA is one effective tool for undertaking this
critical qualitative work.
Unlike many approaches to discourse analysis3, 17, 18 that start from texts or transcripts of
interaction, MDA begins from ethnographic fieldwork to identify the entities that are
present in a given instance of mediated action. This allows the analyst to avoid being
“obsessively narrowed to single moments, speech acts of events, or participants,” and to
aim for seeing “how these connect to other moments, acts, events, and participants which
make up the full nexus.14, p. 9
We have drawn on ethnographic methods as we have been engaged in a multi-year,
comparative study of engineering design processes in workplaces and in undergraduate
engineering education. Following the recommendations of MDA, our initial fieldwork
has aimed to identify key mediated actions that take place in engineering design. To this
end, we have worked with and observed practicing engineers, faculty members in Public
University’s Engineering College, and undergraduate engineering majors to establish and
trace both major clusters of activity that members of the discipline mark as important and
smaller, common practices that constitute the everyday activity of engineers in training.
This approach has enabled us to identify “presentations”—formal or semi-formal
demonstrations of progress in design and refinement of a project and the accompanying
gains in knowledge that are generally expressed during the presentation process—as a
key practice for socializing engineers. In most project-focused courses at Public
University, including the Freshman Projects class that is the focus of this paper,
presentations are graded and students receive written feedback from the instructors.
4.1. Presentations in the Project Class
Although the authors have conducted research in professional and classroom contexts, the
present paper focuses only on the undergraduate context and the role of presentations in
Freshman Projects class, a key course for freshman engineering students at Public
University. Our fieldwork in the undergraduate curriculum, along with ongoing research
with practicing engineers and recent graduates, has led us to identify project-focused
courses as a crucial site for understanding how engineering students are recruited to
engineering identities—that is, how students come to identify with engineering, how they
become engineers. Projects courses are popular among students—both because they’re a
common requirement across majors and because students tend to express that they prefer
these courses to the more content-focused math and science courses that make up the core
curriculum--and projects courses are framed by faculty in the engineering program as
recruitment and retention tools that counteract the stress and frustration that can
accompany other required courses. Projects classes are also positioned as the contexts in
which students are participating in “authentic” engineering practices including
collaborative problem-solving, working with a client, and carrying a project around the
canonical design loop. Moreover, interviews with recent graduates from Public
University revealed that presentation skills were viewed by most interviewees as an
essential skill for a practicing engineer and one that they felt was strongly emphasized in
the engineering program. Presentations were emphasized by the instructors of the
Freshman Projects course, both in classroom discussions and in the rubric; students
received group scores for their presentations and these scores constituted a large portion
of students’ final grade in the course.
Presentations are used by instructors of the Freshman Projects course to deliver both
explicit and implicit lessons on professionalism and to reinforce norms not only about
engineering-appropriate discourse about engineering projects but also about elements
such as professional dress, appropriate language register, and rhetorical strategies for
catching and holding the audience’s attention. For these reasons, we chose in this analysis
to focus on the first formal presentation of the Freshman Projects course, the Preliminary
Design Review. This presentation took place during the seventh week of class. The
class’s 29 students were divided into five groups of four students and one group of five
students, and all groups presented their projects during the Preliminary Design Review.
5. Analysis
In the class session immediately preceding the Preliminary Design Review, students in
Freshman Projects were given explicit instruction on how to design and execute their
presentations. This instruction came in the form of a brief (10-minute) PowerPoint
presentation delivered by the class’s two teaching assistants. Table 1 identifies each of
the key elements discussed in the presentation. The table is organized chronologically,
with each element that was identified by the teaching assistant placed into one of four
categories discussed in the teaching assistants’ presentation: Introduction, visual rhetoric,
delivery, and dress code.
Table 1. Key presentation elements discussed by teaching assistants
Item
Transcript
Introduction:
· Attention
getter
· Introducing
yourselves and
team
Something that a lot of people forget is their introduction. They’ll
just come up here and jump right into the meat and potatoes, going
into this is our project blah blah blah. You really need to come up
and introduce yourselves. A good idea is to do an attention getter.
Now, think about you’re sitting in, you know, an auditorium or
something like that and there’s a bunch of speakers as the day goes
on. Everybody’s tired, nobody’s paying attention. This is why you
want that attention getter. It can be like a major fact, you know the
reason, the problem behind your project. Um, just something to
grab those people’s attention, pull them into what you’re talking
about. And then introduce yourselves and your team.
Visual rhetoric:
Colors and text
themes
The next thing you really need to worry about is the actual
presentation itself. You need to pick colors and texts that work….
Visual rhetoric:
Slide background
You don’t want something that has a background image.
Something like that is way too busy.
Visual rhetoric:
It has to be short and to the point. You don’t want to be reading off
Amount of text per
slide
your slide, you want to be talking to your audience, um, because
it’s more engaging when you’re looking at people and trying to
talk to them.
Delivery: Speaking
to the audience
While you are presenting it’s important to speak to the audience.
You don’t ever want to turn your back and be going off your slide
and speaking to the board. Nobody’s gonna hear you, you’re just
gonna be mumbling and you’re gonna lose people’s attention….
So make sure you’re speaking to the audience. You can take a
quick glimpse at your slides. That’s why you just have them short
quick talking points so that way you don’t have to have your
speech memorized. Another important thing to do is rehearse
before you come up here and do your slides. This allows you to
have good flow with your teammates and also, you have a time
period to give your presentation in so you want to make sure you
rehearse and you’re hitting your timelines.
Visual rhetoric:
Labeled images
All right, it’s a good idea to put in pictures, right? Everybody likes
pictures to look at…. SolidWorks images and animations are really
good for this, but it’s also a really good idea to label what your
picture is so that way I don’t have to come all the way across here,
and if you look right here we have a red LED.
Dress code: Men
For men it’s pretty easy…you want to wear a pair of slacks, belt, a
long sleeved button up shirt. Um, either wearing a tie or without a
tie still fits within business casual, so it’s kind of your preference.
And also dress shoes. Don’t look all nice up top and then have a
crummy pair of shoes on. And then also yeah, make sure it doesn’t
look like you just pulled it out of the hamper either.
Dress code: Girls
Girls it’s a lot harder, there are so many options. Basically, slacks,
skirts and dresses are ok, as long as they follow the correct things.
No jeans, no jeanlike material. As far as the dress top or the dress
shirt that you’re wearing up top, you can’t have um, straps they
have to fully cover your shoulders. It should be a material that’s
nicer than t-shirt material, basically. So something that’s a little bit
finer quality. You don’t want a lot of cleavage…And then shoes,
you have to have nice shoes as well…. If you wear skirts or
dresses, make sure they go just above the knee. We don’t want
short skirts; those aren’t business appropriate at all.
As highlighted above, and in a presentation slide used by the TAs, students were
explicitly encouraged to integrate an “attention getter” into their presentations; the class’s
TA’s described these attention getters on their slide as a “fact, joke, or greeting.”
Of the six groups, three chose to begin with a joke; of the remaining three groups, two
began with a fact and one did not include any of the three possible attention getters.
Because of the relative prevalence of humor, and because of humor’s role in
communicating social values in general19 and shared workplace and disciplinary values
in particular2, 20, and because of our interest in exploring how engineering education
communicates norms through routine practices, we chose to focus in on how these jokes
reflected shared norms about engineering and its role in the world. Transcripts of each
humorous attention getter are included in Table 2.
Table 2. Transcripts of students groups’ use of jokes as “attention getters”
Project
Humorous icebreaker
Possible social
issues
Lift chair for
emergency
responders
Presentation begins with students showing a
YouTube video clip: an elderly woman lying on
the floor, and saying in a frail voice, “I’ve fallen,
and I can’t get up.”
(laughter from student audience)
Ahmad: Helping others is really important. It’s
even one of [our school’s] principles. But
firefighters get injured while helping others. But
we found a solution.
Societally
organized social
isolation of the
elderly and infirm
Automated
chicken coop
door opener
Baahir: We are working in Small Private Farm.
It’s located in City and the farmer there has told us
a problem he is having, and so before I say the
problem, I think that everyone here like, like, likes
chicken. So we would like to care, we would like
to care about them and, so in the future we can eat
them. (laughter from student audience)
Food politics,
localizing access to
food resources
Skateboard
lock
Student-created video featuring team members as
security guard, skateboard owner, and skateboard
thief.
Security guard: Excuse me. You’re not supposed
to have skateboards in here. If you take that out to
the racks outside.
Skateboard owner: I don’t have a lock.
Guard: I don’t know what to tell you
Skateboard owner: ok.
Skateboard thief takes R’s board
Skateboard owner: oh MAN, somebody took my
board!
(laughter from student audience)
Community trust
and economic
disparities, private
property and
property rights
Tyler: That was all done in one take, we all read
the script. So you laughed--that’s huge.
5.1 Detailed description: The Chair Lift and I’ve fallen and I can’t get up
We have selected one presentation, of a project called the Lift Chair, as a representative
example of the use of humor as an icebreaker during the Preliminary Design Review day.
This presentation was chosen for three reasons. First, this presentation was in many ways
typical for this classroom—that is, several features of this presentation were common to
other presentations delivered on this day. The use of humor as a “hook,” the effort to use
popular culture reference in order to make the presentation relevant to classmates, the
effort to present and offer a solution to a technical problem: These were patterns across
student presentations. Second, this illustration highlights some of the ways in which
engineering classrooms are hybrid spaces in which non-engineering discourse is at times
recruited. Third, it makes visible some ways in which humor, used as an attention-getter
during presentations, reflects and reproduces both tacit and explicit norms for
“professional” engineering behavior and beliefs about engineering’s relationship to
complex social problems.
It is “preliminary design review” day in a freshman design course in an
undergraduate engineering program at a large public university. Five students
stand at the front of the room. Others are filtering in from taking a break while
the instructors score the previous group’s presentation on the scoring rubric. The
students at the front of the room are instructed to begin. “Go ahead and start,”
an instructor tells them, “They’ll enter quietly.”
The students begin their presentation, projecting a YouTube video of a woman
lying on the floor, and saying in a frail voice, “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up.”
The room erupts in laughter—the class recognizes and appreciates the video clip,
a remix of a segment from a late-1980s television commercial for LifeCall, a
personal medical alarm marketed primarily to the elderly and disabled.
Ahmad, one of the group members, explains: “Helping others is really important.
It’s even one of [our school’s] principles. But firefighters get injured while
helping others. But we found a solution.” The group then presents their project,
the Lift Chair. Paula explains:
“Injured people or overweight people fall down in strange places…. Firefighters
really have trouble lifting up, um, overweight people. It puts a lot of strain on
them, um, and it’s hard to get them out of weird places.”
The Lift Chair is designed to solve the problem of firefighters sustaining injuries
while lifting people who have fallen and can’t get up. This group has designed a
prototype chair, equipped with winches and a manual lift system so that
firefighters can offload much of the weight onto this device.
At its core, the Lift Chair targets a complex social problem—the challenge of providing
emergency support for some of our society’s most vulnerable people—and reframes it as
a technical, vocational concern. Although more than one-third of all American adults are
classified as obese21, America is ill-equipped to support the physical and medical needs
of these populations22, 23 (Cornwell & Waite, 2009; Thorpe, Florence, Howard, & Joski,
2004). Additionally, the elderly (people aged 65 and older) make up just over 15 percent
of the American population24. Thirty percent of America’s elderly population lives alone,
and many of these older Americans lack a close network of family and friends who could
help them should they fall or need urgent medical assistance25. Firefighters—commonly
first responders to medical emergency calls—fill the gap. Among the most common types
of medical call is the “lift assist,” a request for help when someone has fallen and cannot
get up without additional help26. Lift assists are expensive and often humiliating; often,
the patient who has fallen is injured and may be in a great deal of pain.
Solving the problems hinted at above—widespread shifts in Americans’ health and
mobility, the challenge of caring for our elderly citizens when they choose or are forced
to live alone, providing emergency care that preserves the dignity and the physical and
mental well-being of patients—would likely take longer than one semester. It would also
require moving past the immediate needs of the client—in this group’s case, a local fire
service whose leaders have requested a more effective device for providing lift assists to
obese and elderly patients. The group does not broach these broader social concerns in
their presentation, or at any point in the semester; instead, group members focus on
practical concerns: How to make a stable, functional chair that improves upon the
functionality of current devices used by firefighters.
In aiming to solve the firefighters’ problem, the students in this group technicize the
problem and reframe it as a well-defined issue with a finite and simple set of possible
solutions. Indeed, this group makes light of the concerns of another set of stakeholders—
those who have fallen and need medical assistance—with the video clip described above.
The “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” video is a well-known cultural phenomenon. It was
ranked first in USA Today’s list of most unforgettable ad campaigns27, and has been
referenced in a wide range of film, television, and print media artifacts—Dilbert,
Roseanne, Family Matters, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, The Office, Married with
Children, and many others. Its popularity, or notoriety, is ongoing, as the light and
appreciate laughter of students in the class suggests.
How did these students get here? How did they so quickly and seamlessly turn away from
the underlying social concerns that produced the phenomenon of firefighters straining
themselves during lift assists, and toward the technical question of how to build a better
lifting system? How did the classroom produce an opportunity for students to take it one
step further, to turn the medical concerns of the elderly and the obese into a humorous
attention-getter? How is the decision to make a joke at the expense of that group of
stakeholders authorized by the people and the resources that guide activity—the students,
the rubric, the constraints of the course, and its position within a broader undergraduate
engineering program at a large public university?
Mediated Discourse Analysis provides tools for answering the questions above. An MDA
methodology begins by situating participants in a research site at the nexus of practice:
The intersection of the historical bodies of participants in a given action, the interaction
order that is produced by participants, and the discourses that are used by participants to
mediate their activity. In order to situate activity at the nexus of practice, the researcher
asks the following questions:
1. What are the primary meditational means?
2. Who are the primary actors? (where “who” means both who they are in the sense
of their identities and social roles and what are their individual histories)
3. What is the interaction order? What is the structure of a given category of
interactions (in this case, the ‘preliminary design review’ presentation)?
4. What are the significant cycles of discourse? That is, what different discourses
are at play in a given action, and how do these discourses intersect with each
other?
Providing answers to these questions enables the researcher to elaborate on the four
categories described earlier in this paper. Those four categories—mediational means,
institutions and discourses, interactional organization, and individual histories and
biographical trajectories--will be elaborated in the following section.
Mediational means. The most clearly evident mediational means for executing
presentations include the material resources available to them: The projector, with its
accompanying control system located in a desktop computer in one corner of the
classroom; the PowerPoint and SolidWorks programs presenters used to design the visual
resources that accompanied their presentations; and internet resources including, for the
Lift Chair group, the video sharing site YouTube.com. Additionally, this team drew on a
combination of shared cultural references and shared engineering knowledge as semiotic
resources. Without any introduction or explanation, they played the “I’ve fallen and I
can’t get up!” video; most students laughed appreciatively and even those who did not
laugh did not express confusion or an interest in learning more about the video. This
suggests the video was a part of students’ shared repertoires of knowledge; the presenters
drew on this shared repertoire in order to start with a joke, as suggested by their TAs.
Institutions and discourses. In the case of the example described above, multiple
discourses were at play. The presentation was governed by a combination of engineering
discourse—presentations were described as a “preliminary design review,” a common
practice both in student projects and in the engineering workplaces in which we’ve
conducted fieldwork—and classroom-based discourse. Although students were prompted
to address their classmates and to deliver a presentation that would get and retain the
attention of their peers, students tended to make eye contact primarily with the
instructors, and generally waited to present their work until the instructors indicated that
they were ready to listen.
Interactional organization. The presentation format was governed by a fairly inflexible
set of actions: In each of the class’s six presentations, one student stood at the computer
station at the front of the room to advance the presentation slides, while group members
took pre-determined turns at reading and elaborating on each slide. Presentations began,
per the instructions provided by the TAs during the previous class, with a usually
humorous, sometimes factual, attention-getter; this was followed by a description of the
problem and presentation of the solution. Students were expected to describe their
process in getting to a solution, as well as to present a completed representation of their
prototype, developed through a CAD software program. They were also expected to
present their anticipated timeline for completing the project, from prototype to final
product.
Individual histories and biographical trajectories. The actors in the example described
above are five freshman engineering students of various backgrounds—the details of
which were largely not available to the research team, whose interactions were limited to
the classroom setting. These students’ identities in the classroom, however, were hybrid
identities. They were not simply young adults becoming engineers; they were also young
adults developing new friendships in a new, post-high school context. They were
developing engineers whose bodies did not quite know how to behave according to the
norms of their profession; in a previous class, the instructors delivered a tutorial on the
design and execution of a professional presentation, along with detailed guidelines on
how to dress professionally.
6. Discussion.
The field of engineering education has long focused on instilling a set of core ethical
principles in developing engineers28, 29, 30. Guided by the U.S. Accreditation Board for
Engineering and Technology (ABET), undergraduate engineering programs aim to help
students develop “an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility”31. In
general, however, engineering ethics have emphasized principles such as accountability
to the client—defined as the people or organizations who have retained the engineer’s
services, not as the broader public for whom a given product or innovation will result in
either benefit or harm30. Some have critiqued this approach as insufficient for producing
engineers who think critically about the social implications of their work and the ways in
which their profession writ large enacts discourses of power that at times reinforces
social inequalities32, 33, 34. An ethic of care35, 36, when applied to engineering, calls for a
shift away from a framing of engineering work as the practice of solving well-defined
technical problems and toward a view of engineers as participants in and shapers of broad
social concerns30, 35.
The phenomenon illustrated in the example above—that of depolicitizing a complex
social problem in order to frame it as a simple problem with a feasible technical solution
that can be designed within the time and resource constraints of a semester-long
Freshman Projects course—demonstrates one way in which students are permitted to
move quickly toward a technical framing of a problem, and away from the ethic of care
promoted by some engineering educators. From one perspective, attempts at humorous
“attention getters,” audience laughter in response, and the lack of critical response by the
teaching staff might be viewed as innocuous, as barely worthy of analytic attention. We
would note, however, that students and teaching staff did clearly orient to and respond to
other non-technical aspects of the presentations, such as student attire and grooming.
Students spent a good deal of time at the beginning of the class commenting on how one
another were dressed and groomed, and the teaching staff made deductions from
presentation scores from groups with members wearing jeans, or sleeveless dresses. The
failure to comment on or engage with the jokes described above can readily be seen as a
manifestation in this context of the ideology of depoliticization discussed by Cech. We
suggest that attention to ways in which ideologies enter into the socialization process
should be an important focus of future work on becoming an engineer.
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