What are we talking about here?

With a focus on ‘discourse’ it might seem that we are focusing exclusively on written and spoken language – this might seem fine for the language teacher but only a part of what we are needing to think about in engineering education. In fact, the term discourse refers broadly to ways of using language, mathematical calculations, software, graphs, non-verbal gestures, artefacts and so on. It is the specialist discourse that characterises a particular community of practice (see tool 4). For example, the discourse of being an engineer will involve the practice of design to solve real world problems, and this includes collecting and analysing data, using empirical laws and correlations, doing mathematical calculations and modelling, as well as presenting one’s results to a range of different audiences. From this point of view, successful learning involves using a discourse in order to be able to participate in this community.

What does this mean for engineering education?

In engineering education we can therefore think of ourselves as working to produce ‘technologically literate’ graduates – with literacy used here in the broad sense of being able to use a particular specialist engineering discourse.What is worth noting is that discourse has been an especially useful thinking tool in mathematics education⁴⁵, which should be sufficient to persuade you that this is not simply the domain of the language teacher.

In what ways might this be a useful thinking tool?

So what’s the big deal? If we are focusing on ‘talking engineering’ how hard can it be…⁴⁶ In fact being able to use engineering discourse successfully, so as to be recognised as a competent graduate engineer by the professional community, is not so straightforward, as we all know.There is no simple ‘bluffer’s guide’ to see you through.

Discourse scholars have pointed out that learning a discourse is difficult precisely because so little is made explicit to the learner. Most of the key aspects of the discourse remain hidden.The task of the skilled teacher is to ‘make the tacit explicit’⁴⁷. How to do this? Teaching can be conceptualised as:

• helping to create shared specialist meanings with students
• leading the journey from familiar discourse into the specialist discourse
• coaching students in using the new specialist discourse⁴⁸.

It is important to recognise that taking on a new discourse often involves both loss and gain. Students might be required to give up something of their familiar ways of communicating and relating to the world⁴⁹. Taking on the new discourse will need to seem worth it.

Show me an example

Kittleson, J. M., and Southerland, S.A. (2004).The role of discourse in group knowledge construction: a case study of engineering students. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 41 (3), 267-293.

Julie Kittleson and Sherry Southerland research what happens in groups of mechanical engineering students who are doing their senior design project.What they had found was that, despite the lecturers attempting to promote collaborative work in student groups, there were very few instances of students grappling collaboratively with concepts. In trying to figure out why this was so they drew on discourse as a thinking tool.

They use a subtle distinction introduced by Gee which reserves the term discourse (with a little ‘d’) for students’ actual use of discourse in stretches of text or calculations.The term Discourse (with a capital ‘D’) refers more broadly to ways of thinking, valuing, etc. So the observation that students rarely engaged in any negotiation of concepts came from an analysis of their use of little ‘d’ discourse.To build an explanation as to why this was happening they turned to an analysis of the big ‘D’ Discourses that seemed to be operating in the situation. Here they uncovered engineering students’ views of group work which seemed to focus on using it for maximum efficiency and therefore dividing up work amongst the different group members and not working collaboratively.These Discourses were related to students’ views of what it was to be an engineer.They believed that different members of the group had different strengths and so should take on different parts of the task.

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

Sfard,A. (2001). There is more to discourse than meets the ears: looking at thinking as communicating to learn more about mathematical learning. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 46 (1-3), 13-57.

Discourse analysis is surprisingly difficult to do for those of us who don’t have a background in linguistics, but the best way to learn about it, or even to see if you want to pursue it, is to look at real examples of how it has been used. This article is particularly useful in that it presents two examples of classroom discourse and then leads you conversationally through how one could analyse these using an acquisition perspective and then taking a discourse perspective. The setting is a school mathematics classroom, so one can certainly judge transferability to engineering education contexts.

In this paper, Anna Sfard uses her analysis of these two ‘episodes’ of mathematics learning to spell out key aspects of this perspective on learning. She defines a ‘communicational approach’ which sees thinking as nothing more than our internal (not necessarily verbal) conversations⁵⁰. By definition this is a process that embeds us in a social context. In helping to explain the meaning of ‘discourse’ beyond its everyday focus on reading and writing, Sfard provides a helpful description: discourse is ‘anything that goes into communication and influences its effectiveness’ (p 28). In considering mathematic discourse she notes that its ‘mediating tools’ are predominantly symbolic and that these are regulated by ‘metadiscursive rules’ which are often tacit.

This is a lengthy but very rich paper. It will take a long time to read through in one sitting (be warned!) but you will hopefully find it useful to return to various parts of it. It is really a complete manual for doing a relatively accessible and potentially very productive form of discourse analysis in engineering education.

45. See Kieran et al. (2001). 
46. Leach and Scott (2003, p 9) point out that this is a misconception.
47. Jacobs (2007).
48. Northedge (2003a). 
49. Gee (2004).
50. This derives from the work of the Russian psychologist Vygotsky (1962; 1978).