Unpacking professional shame: Patterns of White male engineering students living in and out of threats to their identities

Abstract

Background: Although prior research has provided robust descriptions of engineering students' identity development, a gap in the literature exists related to students' emotional experiences of shame, which undergird the socially constructed expectations of their professional formation.Purpose: We examined the lived experiences of professional shame among White male engineering students in the United States. We conceptualize professional shame to be a painful emotional state that occurs when one perceives they have failed to meet socially constructed expectations or standards that are relevant to their identity in a professional domain. Method:We conducted unstructured interviews with nine White male engineering students from both a research-focused institution and a teachingfocused institution. We used interpretative phenomenological analysis to examine the interview transcripts.Results: The findings demonstrated four themes related to how participants experienced professional shame. First, they negotiated their global, or holistic, identities in the engineering domain. Second, they experienced threats to their identities within professional contexts. Third, participants responded to threats in ways that gave prominence to the standards they perceived themselves to have failed. Finally, they repaired their identities through reframing shame experiences and seeking social connection. Conclusions:The findings demonstrate that the professional shame phenomenon is interwoven with professional identity development. In experiencing professional shame, White male students might reproduce the shame experience for themselves and others. This finding has important implications for the standards against which members from underrepresented groups may compare themselves and provides insight into the social construction of engineering cultures by dominant groups.

Using Positioning Theory to Study the Role of Emotions in Engineering Problem Solving: Methodological Issues and Recommendations for Future Research

“…Like most educational emotion research, most of the existing studies in engineering education take their theoretical departure in individual and cognitivist perspectives (Lönngren, Adawi, Bellocchi, et al, forthcoming;. Specific emotions have been studied from such a perspective in engineering education, such as empathy (Hess et al, 2020;Walther et al, 2017), frustration (Estrada & Atwood, 2012), and shame (Huff et al, 2021). Kellam et al (2018), on the other hand, focus on a variety of emotions in engineering students' emotional trajectories.…”

“…Most of the existing studies on emotions in engineering education take their theoretical departure in individual and cognitivist perspectives on emotions (Kellam, Constantino, Walther, & Sochacka, 2011;. The focus of that research is on emotions as individual competencies or experiences, such as empathy (Hess, Miller, Higbee, Fore, & Wallace, 2020;Walther, Miller, & Sochacka, 2017), shame (Huff, Okai, Shanachilubwa, Sochacka, & Walther, 2021), and frustration (Estrada & Atwood, 2012). In the broader social science literature, however, there is an emerging body of research that uses discourse analysis to study emotions as social and cultural phenomena expressed in social interaction (Wetherell, 2013).…”

The social construction of professional shame for undergraduate engineering students

“…That project proposed the following three research questions: RQ1: How do students psychologically experience shame in the context of engineering education? Huff et al (2021) investigated RQ1. RQ2: How are these experiences located and socially constructed within the institutional cultures of engineering programs?…”

“…(1) Individuals perceive themselves to have failed to meet socially constructed expectations that are relevant to their identities in a professional domain; (2) individuals experience a painful emotional state amid such perceived failure; (3) individuals attribute the failure to meet expectations to an inadequate whole, or global, self rather than a domain-specific feature of a certain identity; and (4) individuals within professional domains not only experience the emotional state of shame but also contribute to expectations that establish the conditions for professional shame to occur (Huff et al, 2021).…”

“…For example, when experiencing professional shame, some White male participants reinforced the very social expectations they failed to achieve, either by ego-defensive responses (e.g., blaming others for their failures) or by avoidant responses (e.g., not allowing others to see the failure). While the IPA study enabled us to examine the lived experiences of shame in White male students, we were limited in our ability to investigate the shared social contexts in which these emotional experiences occur (Huff et al, 2021). (NB: In this paper we use male as an adjective for masculine gender, although we recognize that it formally refers to biological sex.…”