The Power and Politics of Engineering Education Research Design: Saving the ‘Small N’
The Power and Politics of Engineering Education Research Design: Saving the ‘Small N’
复制标题
工程教育研究设计的力量和政治：拯救“小N”
作者：
A. Slaton;A. Pawley
摘要 几十年来，美国研究人员利用智力、财政和劳动力资源来了解工程领域少数族裔代表性不足的情况，包括通过研究高等工程教育中持续存在的种族和性别歧视。本文考虑了该领域合法和重要研究的现行标准，以及与小群体研究相关的持续耻辱。许多工程教育研究生产者和消费者对“大n”的偏好带来了对人类差异的假设，包括种族、性别、残疾和其他类别的观念，通常出于分析目的对科目进行分类。本文探讨了这种认知偏好如何产生权力，展示了分类倾向如何可能阻碍对美国高等教育中人口特权的深入理解。我们提供了与此类研究的说明性对比，描述了一个针对美国工程学院中代表性不足的少数群体的定性研究项目，称为“向少数群体学习”。该项目展示了交叉研究、酷儿研究和残疾研究理论在质疑工程教育不平等方面的分析价值。我们认为，这些理论所支持的反身性和不确定性阐明了学术社会科学的总体统治关系，同时也反映了我们自己的研究偏好。调查项目的所有特征，包括受试者群体的定义和研究方法的选择，都是研究人员积极选择的，我们要考虑的是这些选择在以公平为中心的工程教育研究中所产生的深远社会后果。
ABSTRACT For decades, American researchers have brought intellectual, financial and labor resources to understanding minority underrepresentation in engineering, including through studies of persistent racial and gender discrimination in higher engineering education. This paper considers prevailing standards for legitimate and significant research in this area and the persistent stigma associated with the study of small populations. The preference among many engineering education research producers and consumers for the ‘large-n’ brings with it presumptions about human differences including ideas of race, gender, disability and other categories by which subjects are customarily sorted for analytic purposes. This paper asks how such epistemic preferences enact power, showing how taxonomic inclinations may prevent incisive understanding of demographic privilege in U.S. higher technical education. We offer an illustrative contrast to such studies, describing a qualitative research project on underrepresented minorities in U.S. engineering schools, called ‘Learning from Small Numbers’. This project shows the analytic value of intersectional, Queer, and Disabilities Studies theories to interrogate inequity in engineering education. We argue that the reflexivity and indeterminacy supported by these theories illuminates the ruling relations of academic social sciences overall, while also reflecting on our own research preferences. There is no feature of an investigative project, including definitions of subject populations and choice of research methodology, that is not actively chosen by researchers, and it is the profound social consequences of these choices in equity-focused engineering education research that we want to consider.