Higher Education Academy Engineering Subject Centre

What are we talking about here?

Identity might seem to be a topic more suited to the clinical psychologist than the engineering educator:“I don’t need to know if my first years are well-adjusted 18 year olds, I just need to worry about whether they are learning any engineering!” It is therefore important to note that the view on identity that we wish to consider for inclusion in our guide does not focus on internal psychological makeup but is much more about how you present yourself to the world and how the world recognises you. In engineering education we are continually assessing whether our students are able to display engineering skills and knowledge with confidence.This is basically what we are talking about when we focus on identity.

There are a number of key assumptions that underpin this view of identity:

MULTIPLE: we all hold multiple identities and deploy different identities depending on where we are and who we are interacting with at that time.

SHIFTING: our ‘suite’ of identities changes over time: we take on new identities and we might sometimes choose to drop a particular identity. Some new identities might require us to do this and we might be in a dilemma if we don’t want to drop that identity.

PRODUCED: there is nothing passive here.To be recognised as holding a particular identity, you need to talk and act in a way that others will recognise you as such.

What does this mean for engineering education?

Learning engineering is not simply a matter of ‘acquiring knowledge’; engaging with engineering is an act that has implications for how others will see you. Students come to engineering with some identities already in place that they use in the home, at school, with their friends.Taking on the new identity associated with learning engineering will either merge seamlessly with these other identities or else there might be a clash. A clash between these identities could result in academic failure or ultimately not choosing to follow a professional engineering career.

It is important to note here that we are not suggesting that undergraduate students are in a position to take on a full professional identity as an engineer.They are not yet able to behave in such a way that those in the engineering community would recognise them as an engineer. So we need maybe to call this the identity of being ‘an engineering student’. This is a broad concept that goes all the way from engaging in certain academic activities in class to a certain way of engaging with campus life.There may be a number of different identities available to your students that all, to some extent, can be used to successfully ‘pull off’ being an engineering student. But you can probably also think of some students who find themselves uncomfortable with or unable to take on these identities. Possibly more so than broad foundation degree programmes in the sciences or humanities, engineering as a ‘professional’ degree places strong demands on students around identity⁴⁰.

The engineering workplace involves a wide spread of practical engineering identities: some engineers focus on design, others on production, others on financial and managerial aspects of the business and so on. However, it seems that the tertiary institution offers a more narrowly defined range of identities and it is therefore possible that some students are not able to find an identity that ‘fits’ and thus either drop out or graduate without a productive identity to take into the workplace⁴¹. This could be at the root of the failure of engineering programmes to deliver an acceptable number of successful graduates.

In what ways might this be a useful thinking tool?

Many engineering educators are concerned about the involvement of students from ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds in engineering education, for example women and ethnic minorities⁴².These concerns centre on the choice to do engineering, success in engineering programmes and taking up engineering careers. Research in this area has often focused on trying to identify the‘factors’that underpin career choices and academic success⁴³. Some insights have been delivered, but we seem to still be very far from having productive insights as to how to widen access to engineering. Research guided by a focus on identity, as defined above in the sociological tradition, has the potential to generate important new understandings of this situation that can be used to guide future interventions.This might allow for ‘a more dynamic approach than the sometimes overly general and static trio of ‘race, class and gender’⁴⁴. Engineering education research using identity as a theoretical tool has tended to focus mainly on gender issues (see below) and so there is productive future scope for exploring other aspects of diversity.

Show me an example

Walker, M. (2001). Engineering identities. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 22 (1), 75-89.

In this paper Melanie Walker reports on a project which sought to understand the experiences of male and female students in a large Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at a pre-1992 university. She interviewed six men and nine women in in-depth individual interviews.The data was analysed using a framework focused on identity.

She found that women tended to adopt what could be termed a ‘resistance’ identity in which they asserted their difference from other females and ‘claimed to be “more like the boys”’ (p. 81).These identities offered a way of succeeding in engineering education but they did not challenge the dominant norms around ways in which one could be male or female in this environment. In fact, traditional ways of thinking resulted in women engineering students being stereotyped as more organised and hard working, something that the women didn’t actually welcome, especially in terms of the work that would get assigned to them in a group. Furthermore, for male students who did not identify with the views of maleness that predominated, there was also little room to move.Thus, the dominant culture ended up disadvantaging a subset of both women and men.While noting that there have been major changes in women’s opportunities in the world of engineering work,Walker notes that the engineering identities taken on by these students ‘both challenge and leave dominant gender relations in place’ (p. 86). Although she is reticent to prescribe practical solutions, her analysis suggests that we need to create spaces where both male and female engineering students can be free to create ‘project identities’ where they are able to build new identities that contribute towards a transformation of dominant gender relations in engineering.

Two further key studies on identity and gender in engineering education are:

• Phipps,A. (2002). Engineering Women:The ‘Gendering’ of Professional Identities. International Journal of Engineering Education, 18 (4), 409-414.
• Stonyer, H. (2002). Making Engineering Students – Making Women:The Discursive Context of Engineering Education. International Journal of Engineering Education, 18 (4), 392-399.

Where can I read further to learn more about this tool?

Gee, J. P. (2001). Identity as an analytic lens for research in education. Review of Research in Education, 25 (1), 99-125.James Gee is well known for his work in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. In this paper he presents his take on ‘identity’ which is sociologically grounded with a particular focus on discourse (see tool 6). Gee’s writing is especially accessible for the non-specialist and this paper provides a useful mapping out of four different ‘sources’ of identity that we can recognise.This could provide a starting point for a research project into the engineering identities in your classroom.This paper is also a useful introduction to Gee’s notion of Discourse (as well as a quick crash course if you feel like it on modernism and postmodernism from a sociological perspective!).Towards the end of the paper he presents a brief illustrative study. It is set in a primary school classroom but it is not too hard to imagine how a similar kind of analysis could emerge from research in an engineering tutorial session. In his analysis of possible identities on offer to African American children in this classroom he provides a hard hitting analysis of how the institution might constrain possibilities for success depending on one’s social background.

40. A useful exploration of the disciplinary identities on offer in engineering education is given in Matthew and Pritchard (2008).The edited book in which this chapter is found is also a useful resource on the topics of discipline, community, identity and discourse (Tools 4-6). 
41. This argument is laid out in Allie et al. (2007).
42. See, for example, Seymour (1995).
43. See, for example,Woolnough et al. (1997).
44. Gee (2001, p. 99).