Jan Nespor did a very interesting study, now I think out as a book, on the
education of engineers in their student days. Much filled with ethnographic
data and insight about their feelings as well as thinkings, the relations
between their macho culture, the pressure of engineering schools, the
problems they are assigned for homework, the competitiveness, etc. In short
the contexts that shape the culture of their thinking and identities. It
says a lot about the thinking, too. I believe he used physics students as a
comparison group. The cite should be easy enough to find.
If I had time to hunt through my files, I'd also find, and perhaps someone
else can do this, the name of the author of a very interesting paper at the
Tucson 4S conference reporting on his interventions in engineering
education, trying to give the students an explicit, and reflexive, view of
their enculturation into the engineering world -- while it was going on.
Evidently extremely successful in terms of student response and demand.
I do so much like using scholarship to disrupt the process of brainwashing
the next generation! rather than using it to find more effective ways to
teach them to think like we say we do ... maybe that for me is the
difference between the actual applications of anthropological and
sociocultural perspectives vs. cognitive psychological ones in education
and society in the last 30 years.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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