Salt Lake City, Utah
June 23, 2018
June 23, 2018
July 27, 2018
Women in Engineering
Diversity
24
10.18260/1-2--31223
https://peer.asee.org/31223
526
An Assistant Professor of English at Boise State University, Dr. Jenn Mallette teaches technical communication at the undergraduate and graduate level. In addition to working with STEM students in her undergraduate technical communication course, she collaborates with faculty in the College of Engineering to focus on enhancing writing education in engineering courses. Her other research focuses on women in engineering, and she has recently published on the results of a case study exploring the connections among women's experiences in engineering, their identities as writers, and their writing.
Team projects offer opportunities for student engineers to learn how to work on a team and produce collaborative written reports. However, research has shown that women often do more writing during these projects, and that their writing labor is unrecognized or undervalued, particularly when the technical work is viewed as more essential. In this paper, we examine the results of a study focused on the writing component in a year-long senior capstone materials science and engineering (MSE) course sequence. This course requires students to complete projects for clients and produce a written report, among other deliverables. To focus more on writing education, the engineering professors brought in an English professor, who researches engineering communication and is coordinating this project, to consult on assignments, comment on student work, and present on writing topics, including managing the writing aspect of collaborative work. Here, we assess the impacts of interventions on student writing and collaboration, focusing on women’s experiences through a series of interviews. These interviews focused on learning more about women’s past experiences working on teams and the effects of the course interventions. Particular to women’s experiences, we argue that by making the writing labor more visible in the project and insisting that each student contribute to the writing, women’s contributions will not only be clearer but also more explicitly valued and their experiences will be more positive overall. After describing the findings, we offer recommendations to continue improving women’s experiences in project-based classroom settings. These recommendations focus on ways engineering instructors who assign writing can ensure women’s contributions are both visible and valued in evaluation.
Mallette, J. C., & Ackler, H. (2018, June), Valuing Women’s Contributions: Team Projects and Collaborative Writing Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--31223
ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2018 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015