Thinking Like an Engineer: Interrogating the Epistemic Hierarchy of a Professional Engineering Community of Practice.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

What it means to ?think like an engineer? and what ?counts? as engineering knowledge is a foundational part of engineering culture. What engineers value as knowledge and how they act on that knowledge impacts nearly every aspect of engineering design and practice as well as who enters and persists in engineering. Researchers have shown that within engineering, there is a socially constructed epistemic hierarchy; technical knowledge and analytical or rational ways of knowing are consistently constructed as superior.This hierarchy is problematic because it 1) functions in ways that devalue social considerations from engineering work, and 2) has been constructed by the dominant social groups in engineering (i.e., White, cisgender, men) and works to maintain the exclusivity of engineering. In this interpretive study informed by feminist theories, I explore the beliefs, reported practices, and identities of engineers to interrogate how the epistemic hierarchy of engineering is reproduced within a professional engineering community of practice. I found that the epistemic hierarchy of engineering was indeed pervasive, and it was reproduced via beliefs about the definition of engineering and the role of objectivity in engineering. The most pervasive shared beliefs used to resist the epistemic hierarchy of engineering were rooted in capitalistic or neoliberal ideology, which is troublesome because it is often at odds with social justice and equity initiatives. I also found that the engineers who identified as women or gender non-binary were more likely to strongly identify with normative ways of knowing in engineering (i.e., analytical thinking) than their majority counterparts, which provides insight into the role of privilege in how engineering identity is negotiated in terms of the epistemic hierarchy. Ultimately, this work implies that we need to "make space? for students and professionals to critically reflect on what it means to think like an engineer to promote a more socially conscious and inclusive engineering field.