Feminism and Engineering | IEEE Xplore

Session F4H

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Susan M. Lord , Eileen M. Cashman , Elizabeth A. Eschenbach , and Alisha A. Waller Abstract - Can you be feminist and an engineer? This paper explores this question and aims to show some of the breadth of experience and meanings involved in constructing this combination. Specifically, for this study we used ourselves as the sample population. We are four women engineers who identify themselves as feminists, with Ph.D. degrees and interests in education. Our backgrounds include electrical, environmental, and industrial engineering and teaching experiences at large and small private and public universities. Our experiences with formal courses in pedagogy and feminism range from none to quite extensive. For this study, we each wrote an essay in response to questions of how we combine feminism and engineering as well as our opinions on feminist pedagogy. We used these essays as data for a qualitative analysis from which several common themes and differences emerged. In this paper, we briefly describe ourselves and present our definitions of feminism. We provide illustrations of our most common themes from our reflections. The two most frequent themes were those of social justice for engineering including making the engineering community more welcoming to a diverse group of people and wanting to enhance student learning. Consideration of feminist pedagogy led to a third theme of critiquing the engineering process itself including who and what is studied. Finally, we present our variety of views on our motivation for investigating feminist pedagogy and its use in engineering education. Index Terms – engineering education, enhancing learning, feminist pedagogy, feminism, participatory research

understand more about the ways in which engineering educators embrace, question, critique, and reject feminist pedagogy and feminism itself. This paper begins to investigate these issues and continues the exploration begun in the Feminist Frontiers session by focusing on a small group of engineering educators who primarily embrace but also question and critique feminism and feminist pedagogy. In this paper, we aim to show some of the breadth of experience and meanings involved in constructing this combination of engineering education and feminism. Our research question, then, is “What are the commonalities and differences in the ways in which these four engineering educators combine engineering education and feminism?” Feminism and feminist pedagogy in the context of CSET education is a very new area of study. The research described in this paper is part of a collection of studies we are conducting in this area. Three other related studies can be found in the FIE 2005 proceedings. The first study is a literature review and translation by A. Waller, “What is feminist pedagogy and how can it be used in CSET education?”[6] E. Eschenbach is the lead author of the second study, “Incorporating Feminist Pedagogy Into the Engineering Learning Experience”, which discusses practical ways of applying feminist pedagogy to CSET classrooms and her experiences enacting an NSF grant on feminist pedagogy with E. Cashman.[7] The final related study is a Work-In-Progress presentation by A. Waller which reviews the literature on feminist research methodologies.[8] This collection of papers begins a foundation for the scholarship of application and integration applied to feminism and feminist pedagogy in CSET education. METHODOLOGY

INTRODUCTION Over the past five years, conversations around feminism, feminist pedagogy, and feminist research have been growing in the CSET education community. Issues relating to feminist pedagogy in science and engineering education [1-3] as well as pedagogies of liberation in engineering [4] have been explored to some extent in the literature. In the Feminist Frontiers Interactive Session at FIE 2004, we explored definitions of feminism, engineering faculty’s and student’s reluctance to use the term, the values of feminism and the possible benefits of feminist pedagogy for engineering education.[5] To seriously investigate the potential benefits of feminist pedagogy for engineering education, it is important to

Since our research question is concerned with experiences and ways of being, our research methods are necessarily qualitative and narrative.[9] We approach this research from a constructivist and interpretive viewpoint whereby we attempt to provide insights into answering the question of how one can combine engineering and feminism by considering particular examples. We are not attempting to describe what is generally true among engineering educators or to predict behavior, which would require a positivist approach. Positivist research which seeks to be objective, generalizable, and replicable requires more knowledge about the context of the research question and the possible range of answers than what is currently available. [10, 11] Hence, we start with an

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Susan M. Lord, Department of Engineering, University of San Diego, [email protected] Eileen M. Cashman, Environmental Resources Engineering, Humboldt State University, [email protected] 3 Elizabeth A. Eschenbach, Environmental Resources Engineering, Humboldt State University, [email protected] 4 Alisha A. Waller, University of Georgia, [email protected] 2

0-7803-9077-6/05/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE October 19 – 22, 2005, Indianapolis, IN 35th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F4H-14

Session F4H exploratory study using a small and particular group of participants. For this exploratory study, we were the participants and the researchers [12]. Our goal was to examine the diversity and commonality within our group of four women who identify as feminists and engineering educators. Our data collection technique was a written, open-ended interview, composed as a reflective essay. Each of us responded to the following questions: • How would you define feminism? • How do you combine feminism and engineering in your life? • Describe yourself in terms of teaching experience, experience with formal training in feminism and anything that you think is especially important. • Describe your opinions on feminist pedagogy. • Why are you interested in feminism and feminist pedagogy? These essays formed our data set for a qualitative analysis through which we constructed several common themes and a set of differences. In this paper, we describe briefly who we are, present our definitions of feminism, and discuss some common themes and divergent views. WHO WE ARE We all claim to be feminists and are engineering educators with Ph.D. degrees in engineering and interests in education and pedagogical research. We are all white and middle/upperclass. We grew up around the U.S. in Hawaii, California, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Our disciplines include electrical, environmental, and industrial engineering. Three of us have undergraduate engineering degrees. One of us has an undergraduate mathematics and psychology degree, another earned a master’s in policy, and a third is pursuing a second Ph.D., this time in education. Three of our spouses are academics with Ph.Ds. All of our spouses have technical backgrounds: two of us are married to engineers, one to a physicist, and one to an environmental policy expert. All of us have children, which perhaps influences our desire to explore new pedagogies and ways of including a more diverse group of people in making decisions for the future. Our teaching experiences range from small to large classes and include private and public universities. Two of us followed a fairly traditional engineering academic path. One took a more circuitous route and another continues to construct a “nontraditional, fragmented, flexible, varied and unpredictable” path. Two of us have taken formal courses in feminism; some of us have a fair amount of experience with the theory of feminism, feminist pedagogy, and other pedagogical theories; some of us teach in traditional engineering curricula while some of us are attempting to explicitly introduce feminist pedagogy into our classes. We represent a continuum of perspectives on how feminist pedagogy is applicable engineering and engineering classrooms.

LOCATING OURSELVES WITHIN FEMINISM By its nature feminism resists a single definition. MerriamWebster defines feminism as “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” or “organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests.” Feminist theory is an exploding area in academia, with over a dozen peer-reviewed journals, multiple conferences, and formal programs from Bachelor’s degrees to Ph.D.s. A. Waller [6] includes various definitions of feminism from the literature, frameworks for situating oneself, and a short history of the women’s movement in the U.S. Relevant to this study are our own personal conceptions of what feminism is and how it applies to our lives. These include: Feminism is looking at life through the lens of gender and the belief that people, regardless of gender, are entitled to respect and opportunity. I define feminism as women and men are equal, that all individuals deserve respect and opportunity. … My definition of feminism is not that sophisticated and probably is not that different from humanism. However, given I am a woman and that is my life experience, I am much more sensitive and aware of the inequities that women face around the world. For me, being a feminist means working to end sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, ablism, ageism, and all of the other oppressions, devaluing of persons, and categories we use to evaluate people. To think about feminism means to be aware of and sensitive to the ways that people are treated because of gender. If these ways are unfair or biased, being a feminist means taking action to address inequity. It is not about male bashing - it doesn’t mean “female good – male bad”. COMMON THEMES We constructed several themes that were common to all of our reflections. The theme that arose most often was the idea of social justice or wanting to make engineering more equitable or more welcoming to all students. The next most common theme was the desire to enhance student learning, often connected to making students more responsible for their learning. Another theme that appeared in three of the reflections was the idea of critiquing the problems explored by engineering as an important aspect of feminist pedagogy. Each of these themes will be discussed and illustrated in the following subsections. Other themes that emerged which will not be discussed in this work due to length constraints include confronting sexism, not fitting in, following a nontraditional path, and confusion or difficulty at balancing choices.


Session F4H 1. Social Justice All of us expressed the desire to make the engineering profession a more welcoming community for a diverse group of people including women and underrepresented minorities. Although we recognize the calls for diversity motivated by a global economy, growing demand for technical expertise, and the need for the U.S. to retain its global dominance in science and engineering; our motivation rests more on the issue of social justice. We believe that all persons should have access, opportunity, and support in pursuing an engineering career. A welcoming community enhances a student’s freedom to choose or not choose an engineering career. As academics, many of these comments focused on improving the environment within the engineering classroom. I would like to encourage a learning environment where students are comfortable in sharing their experiences and participating in the process from their own perspective. I would like students to appreciate other perspectives with genuine respect and view each other as learning resources. I want the student to feel part of a community of learners, to feel that she or he belongs, that her or his voice is valued regardless of what her or his background is. I try to make a special effort to make everyone feel that they belong in my classroom particularly women and ethnic minorities. When I see them exhibiting a stereotypical lack of self-confidence, I try to encourage them and their classmates to listen to them. I keep my eyes open for different kinds of oppression. I define my classroom as a “professional space” and delineate what that means about our behavior toward one another. I walk through the student lounges and study areas, noting the announcements and scribbling on the boards. When I see advertisements like a party announcement that says “Only $5! All the beer, music, and women you can handle.” I don’t laugh, I erase it. When I hear students treating one another badly, e.g. “What does he know, he’s just a bad-ass basketball player!” or “What does she know, she’s just a pretty girl!” I intervene. [I] carefully construct my courses and workshops. I learn my students’ names and make sure they learn one another’s. I think about my examples and assignments – Why is it that some faculty still make students compute the angle and force needed to slingshot a water balloon into a third story sorority house? Why are teams in examples composed of John, Susan, and Bill? I give students choices on their assignments, leave room for them to investigate what is personally interesting, and use cooperative learning with lots of structure, monitoring, and reflection – How are questions used in teams? Is it always to solicit information? Or is someone presenting a new idea in a way that makes critique and further discussion possible and keeps the problem solving process open? Are their intentions understood by their classmates?

Several comments linked this desire for a more equity in engineering to personal experiences as a woman in a maledominated field. Being a women in an underrepresented field and teaching undergraduates has lead me to confront this issue of encouraging women (and other under-represented groups) in engineering. Declining enrollments in engineering require us to reflect on ways to appeal to a broader audience. It is almost a matter of pragmatic necessity, combined with a desire for meaningful learning for all students. As a woman and an engineer, I feel a responsibility to help other women and underrepresented groups to succeed in engineering. I feel a responsibility to work at changing the culture of engineering and being a voice for change. I strive in my own teaching to be fair to all of my students. I believe that I make an impact just by being in the front of the class. I never had a woman engineering professor. In fact, I’ve had few women professors in college and grad school. I also try to break some stereotypes or at least stop perpetuating them in how I phrase problems. I also use gender neutral names on exams or homeworks if I need a person’s name. For example, I’ll use Chris or Terry but not Jane or Sam. Most engineering examples, at least in EE, do not have people at all. However, I often want to have problems seem more relevant and might phrase it as having a technician or a boss come to you with a problem asking for advice. I don’t want the students to make assumptions about the validity of what the technician or boss is presenting based on their gender. I do not think that all women should become engineers but I think that everyone should consider it as a possible career choice and it should be a personal not societal decision of who pursues it. My teaching interests have included examining teaching approaches that make all students feel welcome. I am one of Sheila Tobias’ “Second Tier.” [13] I know now why I left engineering as a first year student and my teaching passions are related to helping others pick and stay in the correct major. Feminist pedagogy is described as an approach which facilitates achieving the goal of social justice. This motivates much of our interest in feminist pedagogy. I am interested in feminist pedagogy because I am interested in positive, inclusive learning environments. I think feminist pedagogy is important because I want to change the status quo in engineering. I want more people to feel comfortable joining the community and thereby changing


Session F4H the profession. I believe that we do need to explore different ways of teaching and reaching out to people if we want this to happen. When I started reading about feminist pedagogy, including its philosophical approach and how one might really implement it in the classroom, I realized that I had found words that described the environment I had been trying to create in my classroom for over a decade. I believe that using feminist pedagogy can make the world a better place, a more equitable place, a more peaceful place. Also related to this general theme of social justice was the idea of outreach mostly to young women in activities such as “Expanding Your Horizons” conferences for middle school girls and advising the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). Finally, two of us specifically mentioned the importance of being a parent including the desire to impart positive feminist values to our children and make the world a better place for them.

want to empower the student to believe in her or himself as much as possible. I am not interested in showing the student how much I know, but in showing the student how much she or he knows. I want the student to feel part of a community of learners, to feel that she or he belongs, that her or his voice is valued regardless of what her or his background is. There are other pedagogical approaches that attempt to accomplish these goals, but the framework and justifications associated with feminist pedagogy resonate with me. By improving the education of engineers, we will get better solutions to our problems and challenges. The way that we as educators can make a difference in the world is to send out more holistically educated engineers to meet our future challenges. Why are we trying to make engineering a more inviting field for women and other under-represented people? It is because we believe that by including these people in the engineering endeavors of design and problem-solving we will achieve better solutions. It is not simply to fill seats in the classrooms. III. Critiques of Engineering Process

II. Enhancing Student Learning The theme of enhancing student learning came up repeatedly. This idea was often intertwined with the first theme of social justice. Enhancing student learning was described as a motivation for interest in feminist pedagogy as was having students take responsibility for their learning. The idea of exploring approaches which encourage students to construct their own knowledge was important. In addition, enabling students to be “better” or more deeply educated is linked to producing more effective engineers who can solve modern problems. I believe that a feminist classroom will allow more students to learn more broadly and more deeply. Fundamentally, I believe that integrating feminist pedagogy into one’s current pedagogy will lead to more success for both faculty and students. I think asking ourselves and our students to do such analysis [of the impact of societal, political and economic systems] is beneficial to ourselves, our discipline and our society. Such an analysis will help us better understand how engineering influences and is influenced by our society. Most importantly I would like to include the ideals of feminism that lead to students claiming a constructive voice in their own education. The community in the classroom should feel compelled to take responsibility for the learning for all participants. I am interested in making the student, not myself, the center of what is happening in the classroom. I want the student to be responsible for her or his own learning. I want the student to see me as a facilitator of her or his intellectual development. I

Three of us specifically mentioned critiques of the engineering process in terms of the problems explored and the social impact of engineering choices. This was related to enhancing student learning in some comments and cited as a strength of feminist pedagogy in particular. The most unusual aspect of feminist pedagogy for engineering educators is the aspect of critiquing the engineering process itself. In particular, asking questions of who benefits and loses from different engineering approaches and/or solutions. Who makes engineering decisions and who does not? Why? What societal frameworks support engineering? Why? I find most scientists and engineers either do not want to acknowledge or want to minimize the importance of the fact that the scientific and engineering processes are human processes and thus subjective, influenced by societal, political and economic systems. Feminist pedagogy encourages us to examine these systems’ influences on our practice. I think asking ourselves and our students to do such analysis is beneficial to ourselves, our discipline and our society. Such an analysis will help us better understand how engineering influences and is influenced by our society. I agree with the need to question the problems that we work on in science and that if women were choosing the problems, that they would be different. For example, less concentration on weapons of war and more on solving hunger. [Feminism] affects … how I frame engineering questions. Too often in my own education, problems were handed to me with explicit objective functions, well-defined constraints, and without context of the local situation in which the solution would be implemented. These problems are fun for me in the way that logic puzzles are fun. It doesn’t matter if I’m figuring


Session F4H out who is wearing what kind of shirt or where they are sitting at the table, the process is the same. But real engineering is about people, affecting and changing people’s daily lives. Who has decided that the “engineering question” is to design a new building on this piece of land to house Olympians and then college students? Why are engineers cut out of the decisions around the acquisition of the land and “relocating” the people who live in the housing project currently on the site? Who benefits when that part is defined as a political question, or a financial question, or a public relations problem? How does allowing only completely electric cars on the Atlanta HOV lanes benefit the Southern Company who provides energy from coal plants to the region? Would allowing hybrid cars to use the lanes reduce pollution overall more effectively? More generally, who benefits and who loses by the problem being defined as this goal under these constraints? In what way does it uphold the status quo? Does it provide an opportunity for increasing social justice? DIVERGENT VIEWS In the discussion of the common themes it is apparent that there is no one way to combine feminism and engineering. Several examples of our own diversity are apparent in our motivation for exploring feminist pedagogy, our idea of how integral the combination of feminism and engineering is in our life, and our vision of how transformative or radical it should be. I believe that the benefits of diversity in engineering education and practice will not be derived until we understand more fully the enacting of gender, race, class, age, nationality (which I call “enacted diversity”), rather than focusing on the “bodily diversity” in engineering. Even if it were possible, I would not make a conscious choice to stop using it because the beliefs and values which feminist pedagogy are founded upon are so important to me. Truthfully, I do not have an inherent academic or personally motivated interest in feminism itself. The motivation comes from the desire to be a good teacher and learner. I have only just begun to think about verbalizing these ideals in my classroom. I think feminism has the most influence on my awareness of power dynamics between friends, colleagues and between students, in their communication patterns and methods for establishing power within relationships. I think my feminism makes me more cynical and wary of the engineering, academic and teaching processes. [in studying feminist critiques of science] I did not agree that all science was itself fundamentally flawed and needed to be completely reformed. I would not agree, for example, that I

felt oppressed when I was in my room by myself doing a calculus problem. [In a feminist theory class] I did not see any of these people not wanting to use technology that is a result of science and engineering but they wanted to demonize the entire undertaking and me if I was participating in it. But it seemed to me that their criticism was too easy-if you don’t have any stake in something, it is easy to only criticize it. So I felt that I didn’t belong in the world of engineering because I was a woman and I didn’t belong in the world of feminist studies because I was an engineer. I am not sure how radical [the incorporation of feminist pedagogy in engineering] should be. Part of me resonates with the idea of creating a totally new paradigm but another part of me finds it hard to imagine how to translate this into practical things such as teaching circuits. When I consider how reluctant many engineering professors are to use active learning despite a wealth of literature that supports its value for student learning, I am pessimistic that something as radical as feminist pedagogy will be embraced. I would like to think that there is room to do things more gradually. I think it is important that we move towards a climate where different questions can be asked such as why are we studying this topic and not another one? Who benefits from this work? Who may be hurt by this work? How do you combine feminism and engineering in your life? This is a hard question to answer for me, as I see the two very intertwined. I feel that being a feminist is essential for me. In many ways I am well suited to being an engineer-I’m good at math, I like solving problems, I like the organization, details, challenge. But being a woman in engineering, I often feel that I do not belong. Thus it is important for me to be a feminist and an engineer. Why do I use feminist pedagogy? How could I not? My feminism is not a “lens” that I can pick up and put down at will. It is an integral part of how I see the world. There is no going back, no forgetting, despite the occasional longings for the ignorance that is bliss. SUMMARY/CONCLUSIONS In this paper, we have begun the exploration of how feminism and feminist pedagogy might be useful in engineering education from the perspective of four engineering educators who are interested in the topics but also have some reservations. We considered our reflections as four women engineers who identify themselves as feminists. We briefly described ourselves and presented our definitions of feminism. We are all passionate about our teaching and eager to educate more effective engineers. In considering how feminism and engineering fit together in our lives, the most common themes


Session F4H that emerged were those of social justice for engineering including making the engineering community more welcoming to a diverse group of people and wanting to enhance student learning. Certainly, these are common goals that we share with many engineers throughout academia, industry, and government agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Engineering. For us as feminists and engineers, these themes were sometimes motivated by personal experience of being in the minority in a male-dominated field and were linked to our motivation for investigating feminist pedagogy. Consideration of feminist pedagogy leads to a third theme of critiquing the engineering process itself including who and what is studied. We have a range of views on how transformative and radical the use of feminist pedagogy in engineering should be. However, we all agree that the potential benefits are worth exploring. REFERENCES [1]

Rosser, S. V., Re-Engineering Female-Friendly Science, New York: Teachers College Press, 1997.

[2]

Subramaniam, B, A. B. Ginorio, and S. Y. Yee, “Feminism, Women’s Studies, and Engineering: Opportunities and Challenges”, Journal of Woman and Minorities in Science and Engineering, Vol. 5, pp. 311-322, 1999.

[3]

Mayberry, M., Reproductive and Resistant Pedagogies: The Comparative Roles of Collaborative Learning and Feminist Pedagogy in Science Education, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 443-459, 1998.

[4]

Riley, D. “Pedagogies of liberation in an engineering thermodynamics class,” Session 2692, Proceedings of the 2003 ASEE Annual Conference, Nashville, Tennessee, June 2003.

[5]

Lord, S. M., E. A. Eschenbach, E. M. Cashman, and A. A. Waller, Feminist Frontiers, Proceedings of the 2004 Frontiers in Education Conference, Savannah, Georgia, October 2004.

[6]

Waller, A., A. “What is feminist pedagogy and how can it be used in CSET education,” Proceedings of the 2005 Frontiers in Education Conference, Indianapolis, Indiana, October 2005.

[7]

Eschenbach, E. A. , E. M. Cashman, A. A. Waller, and S. M. Lord, “Incorporating Feminist Pedagogy into the Engineering Learning Experience,” Proceedings of the 2005 Frontiers in Education Conference, Indianapolis, Indiana, October 2005.

[8]

Waller, A. A., “WIP - Feminist Research Methodologies: Why, What, and How”, Proceedings of the 2005 Frontiers in Education Conference, Indianapolis, Indiana, October 2005.

[9]

Denzin, Norman K. (1997), Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century, Thousand Oaks: CA, Sage Publications.

[10] Creswell, J. W. (2003). Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches (2nd ed.), Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. [11] deMarrais, K., & Lapan, S. D. (Eds.). (2004). Foundations for Research: Methods of Inquiry in Education and the Social Sciences, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [12] Kemmis, S. & McTaggart, R. (2005) Participatory Action Research, in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd Edition, N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Thousand Oaks: CA, Sage Publications, pp. 559603. [13] Tobias, S., (1990) They’re not dumb, they’re different: Stalking the second tier, Tucson, AZ: Research Corporation.
