Tool 6: Discourse
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).
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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 education ((See Kieran et al. (2001).)), which should be sufficient to persuade you that this is not simply the domain of the language teacher.
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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… ((Leach and Scott (2003, p 9) point out that this is a misconception.)) 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.
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Show me an example
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.
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Where can I read further to learn more about this tool?
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.
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