"Turning away" from the Struggling Individual Student: An Account of the Cultural Construction of Engineering Ability in an Undergraduate Programming Class
Stephen Secules, Andrew Elby, Ayush Kumar Gupta · 2016
Broadly speaking he is interested in modeling learning and reasoning processes.In particular, he is attracted to fine-grained analysis of video data both from a microgenetic learning analysis methodology (drawing on knowledge in pieces) as well as interaction analysis methodology.He has been working on how learners' emotions are coupled with their conceptual and epistemological reasoning.He is also interested in developing models of the dynamics of categorizations (ontological) underlying students' reasoning in physics.Lately, he has been interested in engineering design thinking and engineering ethics education.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2016 that locates the cause of such problems in broader cultural practices and interactions rather than in the individual students or their own "mismatched" culture. Literature Review: Addressing Struggling StudentsAmongst the various purposes of academic research in education-to develop new pedagogical theories, to assess instructor training procedures, to incorporate new technologies into instruction-there is long-standing attention to identifying, analyzing, and remediating educational problems.Responses to educational problems can take different forms, from the theoretical (why is the problem occurring) to the practical (how can it be ameliorated).For example: educational problems of K-12 academic inequity and school failure motivate research and policy such as No Child Left Behind.In higher education, identification and analysis of problems facing first-generation college students leads to developing "bridging programs."In a broad sense, this strand of research and remediation tends to be born foremost out of a deep concern of all of those involved with the educational problem at issue.In this paper, we take up the long-discussed problem of struggling students in undergraduate engineering programs.Responses to the problem of struggling students have been varied; the following is a coarse literature review of some responses in order to position our work.Traditional quantitative retention research has documented the magnitude of the problem and clarified large-scale inequities in access to higher education in STEM based on gender, race, socioeconomic status (for example, Ong et al. and Seymour and Hewitt) 2,3 .This research often draws on a metaphor of the "leaky pipeline" to justify institutional remediation, including support programs for racial, gender, and (recently) sexual minorities within higher education STEM programs.Likewise retention research highlighting additional corroborating factors in student struggles, such as self-efficacy and cognitive attributes 4,5,6 , has informed the efforts of some of these support programs in affective and academic dimensions.Qualitative research strands that look at identity and marginalization have documented struggles from the student perspective, noting how aspects of self can contribute to or come into conflict with one's progress and prosperity within a STEM major 7,8,9 .This research often employs a metaphor of "cultural mismatch" or "identity mismatch" to help extend the empathy and perspective of practitioners and those involved in the day to day of STEM in higher education, to consider diverse student perspectives more substantially.Additional strands of qualitative research which focus on cultural and interactional analysis have looked at higher education as a social system, looking at ways that the interactions and cultures of classrooms and institutions work (often unintentionally) to create problems for students (in K-12 science: Carlone 10 ; in K-12 math: Esmonde 11 ; Gresalfi et al. 12 ; in undergraduate engineering: O'Connor et al. 13 ; Tonso 14,15 ).In this smaller body of work, we gain insight into mechanisms which create the problem of struggling students.While we see all of these research strands as coming from a place of caring about educational problems and we recognize their practical contributions towards reform, in this paper we draw on a perspective advocated by Ray McDermott 1 to suggest and illustrate an alternative approach to research on educational problems, which he calls "turning away" from the struggling individual.More in line with interactional and cultural approaches cited above, this cultural construction approach looks at the ways in which many actors within a culture create an educational problem.Thus while we share the feelings of concern motivating the prior research strands, we want to question how these persistent educational problems get produced and reified, including (potentially) via well-intentioned researchers, institutions, and practitioners.We start