Learning from small numbers: Studying ruling relations that gender and race the structure of U.S. engineering education

Abstract

Background: Women and men of color and White women participate in American engineering education in lower proportions than they represent in the general U.S. population. Much existing engineering education research uses individual-level (such as psychological) theories to explain this difference. The study reported here instead takes a structural perspective, asking how social relations are coordinated in engineering education. Purpose: This study explores how the intersection of ruling relations, critical race, and feminist theories can investigate how gender and race are built into engineering education's institutional structure.Design/Method: This study used interviews collected from 17 women and men of color and White women who were engineering undergraduate students at U.S. universities. The interviews were drawn from a project that takes as its premise that learning from such small numbers of students facilitates analyzing data intersectionally. The primary analysis used narrative methods through repeated readings. Results: I offer empirically based illustrations of ruling relations in U.S. universities and schools of engineering that unduly impact minoritized populations. These illustrations include discussions of financial aid knowledge, meeting the needs of transfer and Native students, and how schools crafting "the ideal student" as a young, single White male problematically impact minoritized students. The results illustrate how ruling relations structure engineering education in White-and male-dominated ways. Conclusions: This paper offers questions to help readers consider how ruling relations race and gender their own institutions. In addition, it offers an interpretive, emergent method for interrogating institutional structure and ideas for future work using ruling relations in engineering education research. K E Y W O R D Scritical theory, gender, institutional structure, race, ruling relations

Beyond pipeline and pathways: Ecosystem metrics

“…How do gatekeepers influence the directions students take? Considering the relations of power and tacit knowledge about hierarchies within engineering, when and how do ruling relations (Pawley, ; Pawley & Phillips, ) emerge among students that promote knowledge transmission about succeeding and avoiding failure (Camacho & Lord, ) in the ecosystem? What other aspects of the “hidden domain” (Vanasupa & Schlemer, ) within the ecosystem remain to be explored?…”

“…Like theories of border‐crossing migrants cited earlier, approaches that cast student journeys as individualistically driven fail to capture how those journeys intersect with structural forces. The ruling relations (Pawley, ; Pawley & Phillips, ) of engineering education help frame the story of the migrator experience including both individual agency and the effect of structural forces.…”

“…Within the engineering education ecosystem, bottom‐up interactions may be considered as ways in which students engage with the system through the choices that they make and their interactions with one another and others in their networks. Top‐down interactions could include what Pawley and Phillips () and Pawley () refer to as “ruling relations,” the written and unwritten rules that encode the structures and guide the administrative actors within the ecosystem. In describing the ecosystem, Cheville () notes that stability is “dependent on keystone species or actors” (p. 4), implying power relations within the interactions.…”

Addressing Organizational Cultural Conflicts in Engineering with Design Thinking

“…Other studies have supported Tonso's claims by illustrating similar gendered dynamics (Dryburgh, 1999;Faulkner, 2009aFaulkner, , 2009bGodfrey, 2007;Tonso, 2006). Engineering cultures are also racialized, as most students that matriculate in engineering programs are white (Long & Mejia, 2016;Pawley, 2019).…”

Mentoring: A Focus on Ethnic Identity Development Among African American Male College Freshmen in the Digital Age

“…The Sons of Promise Mentoring initiative employed each of the three types of mentoring relationships in order to create a viable support system for these college freshmen. Mentoring discussions can aid faculty members with the identification of at-risk students early in the semester (Pawley, 2018). Identification of student needs enables faculty to engage students with relevant advice, review of difficult concepts, and augment the course with the critical knowledge regarding their ethnic identity development.…”