Access, Perceive, Interpret, and Believe: A Longitudinal Phenomenology of Undergraduate Engineering Recognition
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Authors
Scalaro, Kelsey L.
Issue Date
2024
Type
Dissertation
Language
Keywords
Engineering , Identity , Longitudinal , Phenomenology , Recognition , Undergradaute
Alternative Title
Abstract
How undergraduate engineering students believe that others see or recognize them as engineering people influences how they see themselves as they author an engineering role identity. Despite the importance of recognition in the development of engineering identities, less is known about how the recognition is experienced by students receiving it. Although the conceptualization of meaningful recognition has been used to describe recognition that may develop an engineering identity, most work presently looks at recognition in support of understanding identity rather than on recognition individually. How students are seen or not seen as engineers stands as a process that may encourage or limit students in their own identity development and illustrates a need for a more nuanced understanding of recognition as phenomenon so that it can be used to design pedagogy and practices that facilitate opportunities for all students to be seen as engineers in ways that matter to them. Engineering education needs a nuanced understanding of the phenomenon of recognition to design pedagogy and practices that include and facilitate opportunities for students to be meaningfully recognized as engineers. Additionally, work needs to explore identity and its construct (like recognition) over time so that students can be supported across an entire undergraduate engineering program. Recognition as a construct of engineering role identity theoretically guided this work to develop a deepened understanding of recognition by taking a longitudinal, qualitative exploration of undergraduate students' experiences of recognition. In support of this goal, two overarching research questions guided this work: (RQ1) How do undergraduate engineering students experience the recognition of their engineering identities? And (RQ2) How do these experiences change over a four-year undergraduate engineering program? To answer these questions, a longitudinal phenomenological study design was implemented to understand 11 undergraduate engineering students' experiences across eight semesters of data collection. Seven focus groups and an individual interview with each student were analyzed using content and open coding to iterate towards an understanding of the essence of recognition as it was experienced by the participants. The Perceptions and Interpretations of Engineering Recognition (PIER) model is the predominant outcome of this work that distills students' experiences of recognition into three steps that they used when interpreting recognition as meaningful or not. Additionally, this work explores how recognition is accessed and perceived by differently qualified recognition sources and how recognition beliefs change over time. Together, these results extend work that frames recognition as a dynamic and contextual process by characterizing how it changes over time and in an undergraduate engineering context. This work builds on work that delineated meaningful others from other recognition sources by illustrating what makes a meaningful other meaningful to students. The findings of this dissertation also start to add nuance to the known relationship between recognition and identity by demonstrating how students' definitions of engineering and their views of themselves as engineering influenced how recognition was perceived, sources were qualified, and practices were legitimized towards the interpretation of meaningful recognition. These findings set a foundation for future recognition-oriented research and have implications for how meaningful recognition could be supported by faculty, engineering programs, and industry.