Gender, knowledge, and curriculum: engineering educators' contribution to curricular disciplinary knowledge practices

Whelan, Karen and Jackson, Carolyn (2024) Gender, knowledge, and curriculum: engineering educators' contribution to curricular disciplinary knowledge practices. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

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.