Collaborative Research: Research Initiation: Writing Education Initiating Identity Transformation in Engineering Students-The Wri2tes Project

这个项目试图通过了解在校学习写作的经历如何帮助学生培养工程判断能力和他们作为负责任的专业人员的身份，来更好地为专业工作做好准备。工程学科在科学原理的应用上是严格的，这些原理直接在本科生的工程课堂上讨论。然而，工程师也被要求做出隐含考虑复杂标准的决定，包括那些使用他们设计的系统或受到他们设计的系统影响的人的福利，以及他们雇主的经济需求。因此，在许多方面，工程学是一门艺术，需要从业者例行公事地进行艰难的权衡，需要专业的判断。这些判断包括经常相互冲突的经济、伦理、社会和基于价值的维度，要求工程师为社会利益做出合理的决定。为了更好地为公众服务，工程师需要将他们的判断传达给工程师、非专家、客户和各种其他人。在所有此类互动中，一个关键目标将是将自己表现为称职的专业人士；要么是作为其他工程师的内部人士，要么是作为寻求他们建议的人的权威专家。简而言之，工程艺术与工程身份的谈判紧密相连：工程师必须能够将工程作为艺术来实践，并制定出合理的判断，以平衡复杂的、相互竞争的目标或限制，他们必须同时以有助于他们识别并被认可为工程师的方式传达这些判断。然而，尽管有这种紧密的联系，到目前为止，很少有研究调查工程学学生的写作与工程身份发展之间的关系，特别是在工程判断方面。这个项目通过探索学生的写作经验如何塑造他们对工程专业的认同感，以及他们传达工程判断的方式来解决这一差距，以更好地确保未来的工程劳动力将最好地服务于公众的需求。为了调查学生在书面人工制品中产生工程师身份的方式，他们希望通过这些方式被认可为工程师，该项目采用了两个阶段的定性案例研究；第一阶段使用学生作业的半结构化访谈和分析来探索书面工程身份的产生，第二阶段使用这些结果来设计和学习旨在更有效地促进书面工程身份产生的作业。这项研究的基础是Gee将身份作为分析的视角，通索的身份生产理论，以及Lea和Street的学术素养方法。在第一阶段，案例研究将重点放在学生通过书面项目产生工程师身份的方式。课程文件(包括作业和相关材料)以及教师关于实施情况的自我人种学实地笔记将提供案例的背景数据。在第二阶段，将利用从最初案例中获得的见解来设计适当的教学工具和方法。很少有关于工程认同的研究探讨写作中的艰难取舍在学生工程认同建构中的作用。此外，很少有调查人员研究学生制作的文物如何反映出学生在职业身份发展和制作过程中必须协商的选择。这项研究有助于我们了解批判性专业实践-写作-如何帮助学生发展整体工程身份，使他们为开发满足社会需求的产品和系统做好最好的准备。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

should cover both intellectual merit and broader impact.This project seeks to better prepare engineers for professional work by understanding how experiences of learning to write in school help develop students' capacities for engineering judgement and their identities as responsible professionals. The engineering disciplines are rigorous in their application of scientific principles, and these principles are directly addressed in undergraduate engineering classrooms. However, engineers are also called to make decisions that implicitly account for complex criteria, including the welfare of those who use or are impacted by the systems they design and the economic needs of their employers. As a result, in many ways engineering is an art that requires practitioners to routinely navigate difficult tradeoffs that require professional judgments. These judgments include often-conflicting economic, ethical, social, and value-based dimensions, requiring engineers to make well-reasoned decisions for the benefit of society. In order to best serve the public, engineers need to communicate their judgments to engineers, non-specialists, clients, and a variety of others. One key goal in all such interactions will be to convey themselves as competent professionals; either as insiders to other engineers, or as authoritative experts to those seeking their advice. The art of engineering, in short, is tightly bound to the negotiation of engineering identity: engineers must be able to practice engineering as art and develop sound judgments that balance complex, competing objectives or constraints, and they must simultaneously convey these judgments in ways that will help them identify-and be recognized as-engineers. Despite this tight connection, however, little work to date has investigated the relationship between the writing engineering students do and the development of engineering identities, particularly in terms of engineering judgment. This project addresses this gap by exploring how students' experiences with writing shape their identification with the engineering profession and the way they convey engineering judgments to better ensure that tomorrow's engineering workforce will best serve the needs of public. To investigate the ways students produce engineer identities in written artifacts through which they expect to be recognized as engineers, the project employs a two-phase qualitative case study; Phase 1 uses semi-structured interviews and analyses of student work to explore engineering identity production in writing, and Phase 2 uses those results to design and study assignments intended to more effectively foster engineering identity production in writing. The study is grounded in Gee's use of identity as an analytic lens, Tonso's identity production theory, and Lea and Street's academic literacy approach. In Phase 1, the case studies will focus on the ways students produce engineer identities through their written projects. Course documents (including assignments and related material) as well as instructors' autoethnographic field notes on implementation will provide contextual data for the case. In Phase 2, the insights from the initial cases will be used to design appropriate teaching tools and approaches. Few studies in engineering identity have investigated the role that navigating difficult tradeoffs in writing plays in students' engineering identity construction. In addition, few investigators have examined the ways in which the artifacts students produce reflect the choices students must negotiate during their professional identity development and production. This study contributes to our knowledge of how a critical professional practice-writing-contributes to the development of students' holistic engineering identities in ways that best prepare them to develop products and systems that meet societies needs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.