Gender, knowledge, and curriculum: engineering educators' contribution to curricular disciplinary knowledge practices
Creators: name: Whelan, Karen
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2024
Subjects: gender and engineering
engineering education
engineering curriculum

description: The lack of women in engineering education and the engineering workforce
 is a longstanding challenge in Australia, along with many parts of the
 world. This problem has been framed as both a social justice issue and as
 an issue that impacts on the size and innovation capacity of the
 engineering workforce. This study examined the engineering disciplinary
 knowledge practices in one institution, through perceptions of engineering
 academics. Using the sociology of the transmission of knowledges of
 Bernstein and the post-structural feminist lens of Connell’s gender
 regimes, I sought to 1) understand the perceptions of gender and of
 engineering knowledge amongst academics teaching within an undergraduate
 engineering degree, and 2) link those perceptions with the contribution of
 academics to the knowledge relations and social relations within
 curricular disciplinary knowledge practices, and the gendered legitimate
 student identities that they make available.
 
 The study is insider research and focused on academics and an
 undergraduate degree at a university in Australia, across several
 engineering disciplines. Utilising an interpretive, qualitative research
 methodology I interviewed 15 academics about their beliefs about gender
 and engineering knowledge, related to their educational practice. Using a
 reflexive approach that acknowledges my personal history as a woman
 engineering academic leader, I analysed interview transcripts to develop
 categories of perceptions about gender and about engineering knowledge. I
 used documents and website material from Engineers Australia to connect to
 the elements of professional accreditation apparent in these perceptions.
 
 My findings revealed that disciplinary knowledge practices in curriculum
 reinforced knowledge relations that valorise engineering technical
 knowledge as content over professional skills as context. The purposes and
 outcomes of an engineering education varied from a personal development
 outcome of technical competence, through to the public good of engineering
 in saving society and the environment. Gender was either seen as not
 relevant or as being a neat binary, with women and men characterised as
 opposites in capabilities, motivations, and interest. Viewing disciplinary
 knowledge practices through the lens of gender regimes revealed a series
 of binaries in tension, which are hierarchical and gendered: between
 content and context, between technical rationality and emotional altruism,
 between heteronormativity and diversity, between the academy and industry.
 These hierarchical binaries serve to create legitimate student identities
 that are well aligned to the traditional masculine, heterosexual, and
 mathematically and scientifically capable man – the “authentic” engineer.
 
 The study presents a model showing the gender regimes operating within
 curricular disciplinary knowledge practices. The model depicts the
 relationships between singular knowledge modes, regionalised engineering
 curriculum, and the purpose and outcomes of an engineering education
 viewed towards the field of practice. These are overlayed by gendered
 divisions of labour, power relations, gender cultures and symbolism, and
 the place of emotions and human relations. Illuminating the gender regimes
 in operation in these disciplinary knowledge practices has implications
 for those practices to be changed. I argue that by disrupting beliefs
 about engineering knowledge and gender, I can engage with engineering
 academic colleagues to create more inclusive curricular disciplinary
 knowledge practices.