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

这个项目旨在通过了解在学校学习写作的经历如何帮助培养学生的工程判断能力和他们作为负责任的专业人员的身份，为工程师的专业工作做好更好的准备。工程学科在科学原理的应用方面是严格的，这些原则直接在本科工程教室中得到解决。然而，工程师也需要做出隐含考虑复杂标准的决策，包括使用他们设计的系统或受其影响的人的福利以及雇主的经济需求。因此，在许多方面，工程是一门艺术，需要从业者定期导航困难的权衡，需要专业的判断。这些判断包括经常相互冲突的经济，道德，社会和基于价值的维度，要求工程师为了社会的利益做出合理的决策。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、非专业人士、客户和其他各种人。所有这些互动的一个关键目标是将自己传达为有能力的专业人士;无论是作为其他工程师的内部人士，还是作为寻求建议的权威专家。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，并发展出平衡复杂的、相互竞争的目标或约束的合理判断，他们必须同时以有助于他们识别和被认可为工程师的方式传达这些判断。尽管这种紧密的联系，但是，很少有工作到目前为止，研究了工程专业学生的写作和工程身份的发展之间的关系，特别是在工程判断方面。该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，以更好地确保明天的工程劳动力将最好地服务于公众的需求。为了调查学生如何在书面工件中产生工程师身份，通过这些工件，他们希望被认可为工程师，该项目采用了两个阶段的定性案例研究;第一阶段使用半结构化访谈和学生工作的分析，以探索书面工程身份生产，第二阶段使用这些结果来设计和研究旨在更有效地促进书面工程身份生产的作业。本研究的理论基础是Gee的身份分析透镜、Tonso的身份生产理论以及莱亚和斯特里特的学术素养方法。在第一阶段，案例研究将侧重于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）以及教师关于实施的自我民族志现场记录将为案例提供背景数据。在第二阶段，从最初的案例中获得的见解将用于设计适当的教学工具和方法。很少有研究在工程身份调查的作用，导航困难的权衡，在写作中发挥学生的工程身份建设。此外，很少有调查人员研究的方式，学生生产的文物反映了学生必须在他们的专业身份发展和生产谈判的选择。这项研究有助于我们了解关键的专业实践-写作-如何以最好的方式帮助学生开发满足社会需求的产品和系统，从而促进学生整体工程身份的发展。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.