Learning to Be Professional

Instruction in the technical and scientific disciplines often provides students with the technical skills necessary to succeed in industry. However, these disciplines also focus on socializing students into professional identities. This study examines one exemplar discipline, mechanical engineering, to see how classroom discourse and practice construct professional identities for students (as future engineers) and their customers. Results suggest that although students' conceptions of the customer provided glimpses of professional identity, design processes in these classrooms were ultimately driven and shaped by academic communicative practices, audiences, and goals. Given this, instructional interventions are provided to integrate professionalization processes within classrooms where situated learning is apparent.

[1]  Dorothy A. Winsor,et al.  Invention and Writing in Technical Work , 1994 .

[2]  A. Strauss,et al.  The Discovery of Grounded Theory , 1967 .

[3]  S. L. Star,et al.  Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On being Allergic to Onions , 1990 .

[4]  D. Fleming,et al.  Professional-Client discourse in design: Variation in accounts of social roles and material artifacts by designers and their clients , 1996 .

[5]  D. Winsor.  Rhetorical Practices in Technical Work , 1998 .

[6]  G. Salomon.  Distributed cognitions : psychological and educational considerations , 1997 .

[7]  Stephanie D. Teasley,et al.  Perspectives on socially shared cognition , 1991 .

[8]  L. K. Monteith.  Engineering Education—A Century of Opportunity , 1994 .

[9]  Charles Bazerman,et al.  Discursively Structured Activities , 1997 .

[10]  S. Shapin.  Laboratory life. The social construction of scientific facts , 1981, Medical History.

[11]  Dorothy A. Winsor,et al.  Genre and Activity Systems , 1999 .

[12]  J. Law.  A Sociology of monsters: Essays on power, technology, and domination , 1991 .

[13]  Dorothy A. Winsor,et al.  Engineering Writing/Writing Engineering , 1990 .

[14]  Karl T. Ulrich,et al.  Product Design and Development , 1995 .

[15]  Charles Bazerman,et al.  Persuasion at a Distance. (Book Reviews: Shaping Written Knowledge. The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science.) , 1990 .

[16]  Francis A Kulacki,et al.  Downsizing the Curriculum: A Proposed Baccalaureate Program and Contextual Basis , 1995 .

[17]  Alexander Zahar,et al.  Shaping written knowledge: the genre and activity of the experimental article in science , 1991, Medical History.

[18]  D. Deitz.  Java : a new tool for engineering , 1996 .

[19]  Walter Guido Vincenti,et al.  What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History by Walter G. Vincenti , 1992, Technology and Culture.

[20]  D. Deitz.  Customer-driven engineering , 1996 .

[21]  Walter G. Vincenti,et al.  What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History. , 1992 .

[22]  Jean Lave,et al.  Situating learning in communities of practice , 1991, Perspectives on socially shared cognition.

[23]  C. Berkenkotter,et al.  Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/culture/power , 1994 .

[24]  Michael Heylin.  books: Mad Cow: A Tale Of Mystery And Horror , 1998 .

[25]  Anna De Fina,et al.  The ethnographic interview , 2019, The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography.

[26]  Dorothy A. Winsor,et al.  An Engineer's Writing and the Corporate Construction of Knowledge , 1989 .

[27]  Richard C. Freed,et al.  Discourse Communities, Sacred Texts, and Institutional Norms , 1987 .

[28]  M. C. Mulder,et al.  NSF workshop on information technology and undergraduate science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education: challenges and opportunities , 1996 .

[29]  Aviva Freedman,et al.  Learning to Write Professionally , 1996 .

[30]  D. Russell.  Rethinking Genre in School and Society , 1997 .

[31]  Kathryn Henderson,et al.  Flexible Sketches and Inflexible Data Bases: Visual Communication, Conscription Devices, and Boundary Objects in Design Engineering , 1991 .

[32]  Carolyn R. Miller.  Genre as social action , 1984 .

[33]  M. Cole.  A cultural-historical approach to distributed cognition , 1993 .

[34]  Michael Davis,et al.  Defining “Engineer:” How To Do It and Why It Matters , 1996 .

[35]  Richard M. Morrow,et al.  Issues Facing Engineering Education , 1994 .

[36]  Linda S. Lotto.  Qualitative Data Analysis: A Sourcebook of New Methods , 1986 .

[37]  Richard Buchanan,et al.  Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument, and Demonstration in Design Practice , 1985 .

[38]  Gene Moriarty.  Engineering Design: Content and Context , 1994 .

[39]  A. Collins,et al.  Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning , 1989 .

[40]  A. Herrington,et al.  Writing in Academic Settings: A Study of the Contexts for Writing in Two College Chemical Engineering Courses , 1985 .

[41]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation , 1991 .

[42]  Jack Selzer,et al.  The Composing Processes of an Engineer. , 1983 .

[43]  Dixie Goswami,et al.  Writing in Non-Academic Settings. , 1981 .

[44]  Louis L. Bucciarelli,et al.  Designing Engineers , 1994 .

[45]  Dorothy A. Winsor,et al.  Writing Like an Engineer: A Rhetorical Education , 1996 .

[46]  Carolyn B. Matalene,et al.  Worlds of Writing: Teaching and Learning in Discourse Communities of Work , 1989 .

[47]  Mairin Brennan.  Job market healthy for new chemistry graduates , 1997 .

[48]  Carol Berkenkotter,et al.  Conventions, Conversations, and the Writer: Case Study of a Student in a Rhetoric PH.D. Program. , 1988 .