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ERIC Number: EJ1478414
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Jul
Pages: 18
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1069-4730
EISSN: EISSN-2168-9830
Available Date: 2025-05-26
An Engineer, for What? On the Different Invitations a University Extends to Its Students to Acquire a Professional Identity
Journal of Engineering Education, v114 n3 e70015 2025
Background: The inquiry into the ultimate purpose of engineering practice and into how engineering students develop a professional identity aligned with it is a matter of great ethical and political importance. Engineering education programs play a key role here by "interpellating" or inviting students, both in explicit and implicit ways, to adopt particular engineering identities. Purpose: We investigated the interpellations to adopt particular professional identities that industrial engineering students in a private university in Bogotá, Colombia, experience during their studies. Research Design: This is a qualitative study with four focus groups with fifth and eighth semester students, using "rich pictures" to stimulate their thinking. Analysis categories depict different professional identities and interpellation mechanisms. Results: We identified interpellations to four general professional identities, related to "technical excellence," the "generation of personal and business economic success," a "liberal ethics of professional practice," and "social justice." The mechanisms for the first two were more ubiquitous and were mostly structural or operated through local interactions, sometimes as hidden curriculum, probably reflecting the normalization of dominant cultural values. Those for the other two were scarcer and included mostly explicit discursive interpellation mechanisms. Conclusions: There are multiple identitarian interpellation mechanisms, some as part of the hidden curriculum in the structural or local interaction planes, which may go unnoticed and silently reinforce normalized dominant engineering identities. It is key to examine and debate these identitarian interpellations among students and faculty. This research also provides conceptual and methodological tools to conduct similar studies in other universities.
Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Colombia (Bogota)
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia