The Unspoken use of Ethnography in Engineering Education

By Fushcia Hoover

I sat down with Dr. Julia Thompson, a recent graduate of the Engineering Education program at Purdue to discuss the use of qualitative and ethnographic methods within her department. Taken from the department website, the Engineering Education program (ENE) is “distinct from instructor-training programs” and focuses on “conducting fundamental research on engineering learning and bridging research and practice—defining effective practices, identifying the reasons why they work, developing curricula, assessing how students learn, and moving those findings into the classrooms of tomorrow’s engineers”. Dr. Thompson’s dissertation research comprised a collection of semi-formal interviews for a multi-site case study of three different education-outreach programs. We sat down to discuss her choice of methods and their use amongst her colleagues.

Dr. Thompson with the LSU mascot, while at one of her research sites.

Interviews and surveys are very common in ENE; however, they have a few additional qualitative methods that are used as well. The first is called a think-a-loud, and it is used to learn how a person thinks through a problem. For example, the participant will be given a design task to complete, and is then asked to vocalize their mental process as they are solving the problem. Draw-an-engineer and draw-a-scientist are also methods used, particularly with children. In this case, children are asked to draw dominant images that they associate with an engineer or a scientist. Content analysis and observation are all techniques used in the department by researchers as well. While these methods are clearly identified as qualitative measures, they are not identified as ethnography. There seems to be recognition of ethnographic themes in the types of methods used, but it is not formally presented that way.

Said Dr. Thompson, “I think mine [referring to her own research methods] are definitely ethnographic in nature. I don’t ground the words in it, that’s not how I write it up when I talk about it.”

For example, one of her colleagues spent three months in northern India to work with Tibetan refugees, teaching them engineering skills while learning about the culture and community. Though ethnographic in nature, and named as such by the researcher, she presented her findings in a systematic way.

Lastly, we discussed the challenges for researchers in ENE interested in specifically using ethnographic methods and identifying them as such. While researchers within the ENE department often perform interdisciplinary work and value qualitative methods to a greater degree than quantitative, apprehension towards the use ethnographic methods due to its flexibility persists as a challenge.

“I think that in our field, that would be hard to fly [in reference to ethnography being less concerned with quantification and more concerned about describing a particular situation, community or interactions]. Realistically, we would want to be like, exactly how did you answer you question, what steps did you take. It definitely…there’s a need for high level of rigor and high clarity in the process and I think that would make ethnography more difficult”.

So while their department performs primarily qualitative research, the need to quantify results inhibits the acceptance of ethnography as a research method, as quantitative research is more appreciated.