Giving an example of making claims and supporting them with evidence (part 2)

I am belated in sharing my CAREER proposal rationale with you, as Robin has already done. Here it is.

1.1 Project rationale
In recent decades, hundreds of educational interventions, thousands of research programs, and millions of dollars of federal funding, have addressed the underrepresentation of white women and people of color at all career levels and across all disciplines of engineering [e.g., 1]. Researchers seeking to understand white women and people of color’s underrepresentation have explored gender and race differences in psychological constructs, cognitive skills, affective measures, and social behaviors considered relevant to students’ engineering educational success. They have striven to understand the impact of implicit bias, chilly climate, and micro-inequities on white women’s and people of color's continued low rates of entry into and comparatively high rates of exit from the engineering educational and professional “pipeline” compared to their white male colleagues. Their studies have spanned the space of gender, race, and engineering by exploring underrepresented people's relationships as young students with peers, teachers and parents, as young ethnically diverse women and men with media, role models, and career visions, as undergraduate and graduate students with teams, mentors, and technical material, and as professionals with colleagues, peer-reviewers, and institutional leaders.

While these studies have helped the engineering education enterprise make modest improvements in the numbers of white women and people of color in engineering undergraduate programs, these improvements seem to have plateaued [2]. The numbers of white women and people of color in engineering have not increased proportionately to the effort expended by the community. This proposal argues that an explanation for this persistent state can be found in methodological and theoretical limitations of these studies, which, to a large extent:

• rely on statistical methods to claim generalizability, even though the numbers of white women and people of color in the study populations are usually too small to justify powerful significance claims. The number of people of color specifically is usually so small that researchers lump all ethnicities of color together to contrast with white populations, or say that no claims can be made about race altogether;
• provide solutions that continue to rely on moulding individuals to better fit into existing institutional structures, despite collective calls to “fix the system, not the student;”
• focus on primarily white institutions (PWIs) and neglect those institutions which successfully educate relatively large numbers of white women and people of color in engineering: women’s colleges and minority serving institutions (MSIs).

This proposed study addresses these limitations by importing powerful theoretical and methodological tools designed to understand gender and race in institutional context. Rather than use methods for studying large numbers of people where we do not have large numbers, it uses methods that allow researchers to “learn from small numbers.” Rather than completing group-level analyses to tell individuals how to better fit into existing institutions, it examines a small number of individual narratives in great depth to examine institutional structure as the unit of analysis. Rather than primarily studying engineering educational institutions that are relatively not successful at educating white women and people of color, it focuses on institutions that are successful, such as women’s colleges and MSIs.

In this project, I will use personal narratives of people considered marginalized in engineering education undergraduate programs in the US to map out the gendered and raced structure of the broader institution of engineering education. This project will achieve two intertwined goals pivotal to advancing the participation of underrepresented groups in engineering:

Research Goal: To identify institutional-level characteristics present in post-secondary engineering educational structures that strongly support or challenge the academic success of underrepresented undergraduate students. To accomplish this goal, I will collect and analyze personal narratives contributed by underrepresented students situated at institutions that have histories of successfully recruiting, retaining, and graduating white women and students of color.

Educational Goal: To design, develop and evaluate a workshop with engineering education leaders that prompts them to imagine what an engineering education institution would look like if it were intentionally designed around the lives of diverse students. This educational goal will put the results of the research into practice by targeting those most able to influence engineering undergraduate institutions, including deans, department chairs, and senior faculty. This workshop will enable leaders to develop innovative approaches to addressing the persisting problem of undergraduate engineering student body homogeneity.

To meet these goals, the proposed study addresses two research questions:

RQ1. How do underrepresented undergraduate engineering students describe their interactions with educational institutions through personal narratives?

RQ2. What institutional factors do these narratives reveal that affect the educational persistence and success of white women and students of color in undergraduate engineering educational institutions?

My guiding hypothesis is that personal narratives can tell us things about gender and race that graphs cannot; as a result, collecting and using compelling, rich personal narratives that demonstrate the complexity of underrepresented students' lives from a small number of participants will be more effective in prompting engineering education leaders to think of new ways to address institutional issues that affect underrepresented students' academic success.

This research is innovative because it proposes a radical new theoretical and methodological direction for engineering education research about underrepresentation: using personal narratives as a way to understand the “ruling relations” of the engineering education institution. The outcomes will (a) inform the theoretical and methodological foundations of future recruitment and retention research and programming, and (b) share tested tools to prompt engineering education leadership to think innovatively about their institutional responses to underrepresentation.

These project goals substantially advance my larger career goal: to do innovative, strongly grounded research that helps build engineering education institutions around the lives of diverse students.

I am ideally suited to undertake this project because of my unique expertise in both engineering education research and intersectional theory, my knowledge of social theories of gender and race and STEM academic institutions via women’s studies and sociology, and my experience in conducting innovative engineering education research on gender and race. I have a strong track record of using interviewing, institutional ethnography, action research methods, and oral histories to understand engineering academic institutions. My current research program studies STEM tenure-track faculty members’ work through their experience of policies, in order to develop academic STEM institutions that are more inclusive of the lives and work of faculty women, particularly women of color [3, 4]. This project extends that work and furthers my career goal by examining the experiences of undergraduate students.

References cited

1. Research on Gender in Science and Engineering Program NSF-GSE. New Formulas for America's Workforce. 2010 [accessed 7/19/10]; Available from: http://www.nsf.gov/ehr/hrd/Newformulas /newformulas.jsp
2. National Science Foundation Division of Science Resources Statistics, Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 2009. 2009, National Science Foundation: Arlington, VA.
3. Banerjee, D. and A.L. Pawley. Institutional Ethnography: A research method to investigate the work-life experiences of women faculty members in STEM disciplines. Conference proceedings, American Society for Engineering Education National Conference and Exposition. 2010. Louisville, KY.
4. Hoegh, J. and A.L. Pawley. Modeling the career pathways of women STEM faculty through oral histories and participatory research methods. Conference proceedings for the American Society for Engineering Education National Conference and Exposition. 2010. Louisville, KY.

Alice's MISs from Week 11 class

My offerings for the most important sentences from the 4 readings from this week's class:

Slaton 2001: 

 p. 51 -- “The materials experts, outlining requirements for success in their field, attached moral and cultural achievement to a set of personal features – namely, masculine gender and other “inherited” characteristics. With this kind of attachment one could formulate an image of good engineers as best derived from a “stock” of white males. If gender and ethnic origin can be seen to determine technical prowess, one then has a means of attaching technical ability, and all its associated social rewards, to that social “stock.”

or 

p. 60 -- “The presentation of character, religious practice, gender, race, and even voice and hair color as matters pertinent to technical operations fits with the subjective nature of technical work outlined within engineering coursework.

Slaton 2010

Ch 4 

p. 100 -- “It is exactly the nature of the “pool” that requires historical analysis if we are to understand the ongoing underrepresentation of African Americans in engineering. If a student arrived at the end of high school without having achieved visible and conventional measures of academic success, he or she was not invited into the world of higher engineering education. This was disproportionately the case with minority students who made up the majority at underfunded, inner-city high schools.... Thus, to mandate the admission of only qualified and not qualifiable students put the burden of integration on a part of the education system that patently was not doing its job.”

p. 101 -- “What would have happened if institutes of technology and universities, given enough support and sanctioning by employers of their engineering graduates, took over the task of remedial education? Schools could conceivably maintain sound material standards for engineering but train students over longer periods, with greater provisions for remedial instruction. Even if such instruction costs more than existing approaches, why have educators and policy makers historically not found it worth expending such resources to correct a social inequity?”

p. 133 -- "These familiar categories of analysis [connect to Bowker & Star!] helped to naturalize the idea that economic activity can connect apart from social considerations. To suggest that social matters can or should be introduced into economic decision making obscures the fact that economic priorities are born of social priorities.”

p. 134 -- "What did it mean for engineers to insist in this period that “technical” and “social” were two different epistemic categories?"

Bix 2002

p. 730 “These treatments embedded lessons in physics and engineering squarely inside culturally acceptable boundaries of women’s knowledge.”

Bix 2005

p. 123 “War even fostered appreciation of the potential talent of women in home economics, especially those majoring in domestic technology.”

p. 125, "Cadettes’ presence also led male engineering students to reevaluate assumptions linking technical education to masculinity."

Folks did a nice job picking these themes out (even through other sentences).  Thanks for putting them on the blog so we can remember them too.

Boards from Thursday's class

Guiding questions for week 9: outsiders and engineering

A couple of fairly simple but still important guiding questions for the readings this week:

1. In each article, who are the "outsiders" and who are the "insiders?"  Think about the actors, as well as the authors and the audiences.
2. In each article, what do the "outsiders" tell us about?  Think about the actors, tools, ideas, boundaries...
3. What does the collection of these articles tell us about "engineering?"

See you on Thursday.  Robin will be waving to us from Australia.  :-)

Spirit of the Land Grant Colleges

We've been talking about the Morrill Land Grant Act in class last week, this week, and it will come back again.  If you haven't seen it, go check out the Spirit of the Land Grant Colleges mural that is located above HSSE's main entrance doors.  Look at all the imagery.  Look at who is doing work, and what work is represented, and how it is represented.  It is TOTALLY FASCINATING.

Here's information about the mural: http://www.lib.purdue.edu/hsse/infopages/news/spiritlandgrant.html
Here's the mural: http://www.lib.purdue.edu/hsse/infopages/news/spiritmural.html

Who is grading whose papers?

Just for y'alls information, Alice is grading:

• Benjamin
• Hadi
• Diana
• Natalie
• Xin
• Xingyu
• Daniel
• Tatiana
• Lorie
• Elizabeth
• Tamecia

Robin is grading:

• Jeremi
• Oluwatosin
• Nichole
• Nikitha
• Corey
• Mariana
• Julia
• Jeffrey
• Evangelia
• Ruth

George will be constructively commenting on a few essays to give him the experience, and to give those folks another perspective.  Talk with Alice or Robin if you have questions.

Belated guiding questions on Noble and Layton

I'm a bit late on getting you these questions, but here they are in any event in case you haven't gotten to your reading yet.

How do Noble and Layton *together* argue how the engineering profession evolved? What were the major signposts each used? What were the different historical steps? How has engineering as a "profession" evolved over time, as described by each?

Gieryn describes the boundary work that goes into the practice of science and technology, and outlines both the characteristics of boundary work itself and gives appetizers to his later chapters of various boundary work cases (which we won't read here, but I recommend you do read at some point, particularly the one on the NSF/NSSF).  How might the tool of "boundaries" be helpful in thinking through Noble and Layton's histories of the engineering profession?

See you Thursday.  We're beavering away on your essays...

Guiding questions: what is engineering?

Next week we're starting to move into the space of asking "what is engineering?"  A couple of guiding questions for you to consider as you read Figuoeira, Jonassen & Strobel, and Koen:

1. What does each argue about the "nature" of engineering? (What would be their answer to the question, "what is engineering?" How about their answer to what engineers know and how they know it?)
2. How does each build their arguments?  What evidence do they use to convince their readers?  What was persuasive (or not) about their arguments to you?  Why?
3. What does each suggest (particularly indirectly) about the aims and process of engineering education?

We look forward to reading your thoughts.

YouTube wishlist

So you wanna make a youtube video!  Put in the comments here the things you wish you could do in movie-making software (or something else associated with making your youtube video).  Our current list:

• Translation between Windows Movie Maker and iMovie (or from Windows to Mac)
• Titles and credits and text over images
• How to use software remote
• How to import powerpoint files into movie format
• Merging/gluing video files together
• Special effects, like green screen
• Recording narration

What else?

Tips on peer-reviewing

Today we started peer-reviewing our first drafts of our first essay for this course.  Some guidelines for reviewing your peers' work:

As a reviewer:

• Critique the argument, rather than the person. Ex: "This argument seems to be missing a step, can you please explain this part?" rather than "You skipped ideas in your argument."
• Specific comments related to the objectives are helpful, rather than "it is good." (Full stop.)  Keep in mind our criteria of grounding, clarity, engaging, and organized.
• As a reviewer, ask for clarification on confusing points. (Psst: clarity.)
• Hearing your work reviewed is an emotional experience.  Be gentle.
• Think about providing your feedback in a "sandwich" format (good thing, critical thing, good thing) or as warm and cool feedback (warm=good, cool=critical, avoiding extremes of hot and cold).
• Provide help in seeing the places that need grounding, and in seeing places in the literature that can provide that grounding.
• Focus on ideas, not copyediting.
• Focus on the argument, not whether you agree with the argument (in terms of the values represented). (Psst: organization.)

As a writer:

• Help the reviewer know what you want feedback on.  Ex: "I know this specific section doesn't make much sense yet, but I'd like some feedback on whether the overall argument is clear."
• Don't expect your reviewer to copy-edit.  Get help elsewhere for this -- the writing lab may be a place for such help.
• If the feedback you are getting from your reviewer is not helpful -- courage!  You are welcome to redirect them by emphasizing what would be more helpful.  However, recognize that sometimes they may have valid points even if you were hoping for feedback on something else.
• Ask for reviewing feedback from others, including family members, friends in other programs, graduate colleagues, other colleagues.  Peer reviewing can happen outside this class more frequently than we do it inside the class.

The groups we had on 9/23/10:

• Julia, Diana, Jeremi
• Corey, Nikitha, Tatiana
• Lorie, Beth, Xingyu
• Tosin, Dan, Benjamin
• Mariana, Nichole, Jeff
• Angela, Ruth, Tamecia
• Natalie, Xin, Hadi

Fodder for youtube videos

Our YouTube project is motivated by this video.

However, you can make your team's video as involved or simple as you like. Past years have gotten pretty involved; you can do something completely different for them. But in case you want a way to calibrate yourself, here is a list of all our past years' YouTube videos.

http://www.youtube.com/user/alicepawley#grid/user/841ECAED68149FD0

Blog interaction guide

Opportunity to:
Engage with colleagues
That the blog space is "different" than our class space
Use blog to help you think (reflect, synthesize, connect to readings, etc.)

Need:
Foundation for trust (recognizing this is a process...this is a start with a little leap of faith)
Safe space to explore ideas and to make mistakes (large and small, even very small)
Being comfortable with less coherent posts (for me to be comfortable, for others to find value)
Ways to connect with other ideas and have a dialogue (need help with "threading" and "tagging")

• Create tags / labels to help people know what you want / need

A place to put struggles and questions
A place for guiding questions
A place for fragmented ideas
Okay to say "I'm not looking for a comment" and "I am looking for a comment"
How to respectfully disagree / challenge people to explore their ideas (encouragement to think differently)

• engage with the ideas and other ideas - speaking to the "third place"
• first show you understand (e.g, restate what you saw), then engage philosophically
• help clarify the part you disagree with 
• put some distance between the post, the responder, the response and the comment

How much "grounding" needs to be in the blog posts?
Is it OK to not blog?  
Freedom to "author" own growth
Questions of audience
How to get email notification of comments - in future blog post :)

What are our purposes for blogging in this class?


What are our house rules for blogging? (Board 1)


What are our house rules for blogging? (Board 2)

Guiding questions for Week 4: Dall' Alba

Last week we explored the role of epistemology in thinking about the aims and process of education. This week we're going to read a "contemporary" take on education philosophy that critiques an overemphasis on epistemology (theory of knowledge) and an artificial separation of "mind" from "body".

What is the basis of Dall'Alba's critique on current views of education? (what is her argument?)

What alternative framework does she put forth?

What might it look like to design an education based on this alternative framework?

Some tips on writing

In class, I also shared some ideas on how to improve your writing.  Here are some highlights:

• Avoid the cosmic opener.  If you start off your paper's introduction with some kind of grand statement about the meaning of life, the way humans have always done something since the beginning of time, or similar, leave it until you know what you specifically want to say, and then write it over.  :-)  Some examples of good (albethey not awesome) starting sentences:
• The aftermath of World War II resulted in the government investing vast quantities of public money in the support of a new form of institution: the research university.
• Scholars in the 1960s and 1970s explored the intersection of education "as a practice of freedom" and the structure of classrooms in order to question power relations between instructors and students.
• A formative experience in my educational history was learning philosophy through reading French.
• I first thought about being an engineer after being very successful in an advanced chemistry class in high school.
• Strive to avoid using the passive voice.  One of our tasks as your instructors in this class is to prompt you to structure strong arguments grounded in evidence.  When your evidence largely consists of the words of others, the passive voice allows you to avoid articulating WHO said or did or prompted your point.  
• Some examples of the passive voice:
• Education in US K-12 contexts was designed to help children grow using the liberal arts.
• A study was done that claimed people don't learn through rote repetition, but through constructing their own knowledge frameworks.
• Constructivism is considered a popular cognitive framework.
• Students are taught from textbooks.
• Instead, use the active voice.
• Some educators emerging from the Progressive Era structured learning environments around discovery.
• Rousseau has many ideas about the education of men, but does not speak as much about the education of women.
• Noddings uses the tool of formal logic to illustrate challenges to naturalistic argument.
• Once you have written a complete-ish draft, reoutline your paper.  In other words, take a paragraph you've written and try to summarize its big idea, write it in the margin.  Do you have more than one big idea per paragraph?  You might then want to split them into two paragraphs, where you say your big idea, and then spend the rest of the paragraph supporting it.  Once you've summarized all the paragraphs, look at all your big ideas, and think about whether the flow of those ideas help you make your overall point.  Do you need to reorder paragraphs? Do you need to delete one entirely (or save it to a "cut paragraphs" file in case you want it again later) because it is a distraction?
• Have colleagues read your essays.  Not just the folks in ENE or in class -- have your roomate, your partner, your kids read your essay and give you specific advice.
• Let your ideas stew.  Write something, and leave it aside.  You might mull it over, and want to rewrite bits.  You might return to it with fresh eyes to improve how you have made a point.  So plan in time to be able to leave it aside.
• Writing can be a way to think through ideas.  So as you write, you might change your overall point or story.  So then don't leave the beginning of your essay in the place you started -- we should not need to retrace your journey to follow your argument.  START OVER.  Otherwise we will note you are drifting through your essay.  Try to stay focused over the period of your essay.
• Make use of the Writing Lab, either the online version, or the in-person version.  They are great resources - especially the in-person version.

Let me know if you have questions on these, or add ideas to the comments below!

Key vocabulary to listen for: what is on your ??? list?

In class, Dan noted to me that it would be helpful to have a discussion/definition around some of the terms that get tossed a lot "around here" (and elsewhere in engineering education).  :-)  Some of those terms include:

• scaffolding
• epistemology (as noun, adjective)
• pedagogy (as noun, adjective, verb?)
• 
  

What are other terms you hear tossed around that you really wish someone would define, situate, or outline for you?

Some chewy questions on Noddings so far...

In Chapter 1 Noddings describes educational philosophies that are still relevant today. What does each have to say about the purpose of education, who is educated (and what they are educated for), how they are educated, and (linking to Chapter 6) what it means to be educated?

How do these philosophies relate to your own engineering education experiences? What does this YouTube video suggest about the purpose or process of education?



In Chapter 6 Noddings describes different ways of knowing (epistemologies).  How do they compare (or what makes them different)?  In what ways are these evident in your synthesis essay (e.g., your theories of knowing engineering)?

Meta note: Noddings on and doing philosophy

Last week I mentioned that, while Noddings is writing about philosophy, she also drops these little clues every so often that the way she is writing about philosophy is itself a philosophical argument.  I'll share the couple of notes I made -- as you discover ones yourselves, feel free to share them in the comments.

p. 21: This comment of Dewey's reveals something of the flavor of criticism philosophers of education sometimes direct at one another's work.  We have seen that Dewey expressed admiration for something in the work of Rousseah, Pestalozzi, Herbart, and Froebel, but he also found difficulties -- recommendations not fully grounded, inconsistencies, and ideas incompatible with Dewey's own underlying beliefs concerning the nature of the child, the meaning of education, the role of teaching, and the nature of lessons.

p. 55
Philosophers often do what we have done together in the last few pages.  Starting with a scheme such as Scheffler's they raise objections or reject certain points.  They may argue for new or revised criteria, predict consequences that the original author failed to foresee, probe for suppressed premises, or reject the entire scheme as wrongheaded.  Often a particular line of argumentation leads quite naturally into another domain for analysis.

What else does Noddings share about the nature of philosophical argumentation?

Thoughts on chapters 3, 4:philosophical questions about education?

What are questions about education that each philosophical perspective/school might ask?  (Final group work of today's class.  We will come back to this on Sept 9.)

Analytical

• What PRECISELY is learning?
• Does teaching imply learning?

Existentialism

• don't define me!!!
• what is the nature of choice?
• what is the role of the learner?

Phenomenology

• what is an experience in which you were "educated" or were taught or were a learner?
• what is an "education of caring"?

Critical theory

• who has power in/over education?
• what is priveleged knowledge?

Post-modernism

• should/must knowledge be political?

Snack schedule

Thanks to folks who are willing to bring snack for class!  If you're able and willing to accomodate them, we have some vegetarian people and some people who don't do well with some salads in our class.

Sept 2: open
Sept 9: Angela
Sept 16: Xingyu
Sept 23: open
Sept 30: open

Oct 7: Dan
Oct 14: Ruthie
Oct 21: open
Oct 28: open

Nov 4: open
Nov 11: open
Nov 18: Tatiana
Nov 25: Thanksgiving - no class

Dec 2: Mariana
Dec 9: open
YouTube extravaganza: Robin and Alice

If you're willing to help out with one of these open dates, feel free to edit this post or add your date (and name ;-) ) to the comments of this post.  Thanks!

Recipes from class: Zucchini spice cake

Several of you asked for the recipe for the zucchini spice cake we had at break today.  I'm happy to share it here -- and feel free to share recipes for things you contribute for snack here in the future so we can all learn some new cooking tools!

Zucchini Spice Cake
from Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts, p. 136
Published by Clarkson N. Potter, Inc, New York, 1997

Serves 16
Preparation time: 40 minutes
Baking time: 40-45 minutes
Cooling time: 10 minutes
Equipment: 10-inch bundt pan, electric mixer

Ingredients:
1/2 c butter
1 1/2 c packed brown sugar
3 eggs
1 1/2 c unbleached white pastry flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cardamom
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 1/2 c grated zucchini
1 c toasted chopped nuts (such as almonds, pecans, or walnuts, or a mixture)
1/2 currants or rasins
sprinkling of confectioners' sugar

Steps:

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.  
2. Generously butter or oil a bundt pan (I use a loaf pan).
3. In a large bowl with an electric mixer, cream together the butter and brown sugar until light.  Beat in the eggs and mix well.
4. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamom. 
5. Fold the dry ingredients into the creamed mixture.  Fold in the vanilla, zucchini, nuts, and raisins.
6. Pour the batter evenly into the prepared pan and bake for 40-45 minutes until the cake is golden and a knife inserted into the center comes out clean.  Cool in the pan for 10 minutes, and then invert the cake onto a plate -- tap the bottom of the pan to release the cake, if needed.
7. Sprinkle with confectioners' sugar, if desired, and serve warm or at room temperature.