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Shame is a deeply painful emotion people feel when they perceive that they have fallen short of socially constructed expectations. In this study, professional shamerefers to shame experiences that stem from people's perceptions that they have failed to meet expectations or standards that are relevant to their identities in a professional domain. While socially constructed expectations placed on engineering students have been implicitly addressed in the engineering education literature, they have rarely been the subject of specific inquiry. As part of a broader study on professional shame in engineering, we investigated the co‐construction of social worlds that place expectations on engineering students. We conducted 10 ethnographic focus groups with undergraduate engineering students from two universities. These groups were either heterogeneous or homogeneous, regarding racial and gender identity, to examine multiple social realities. We present significant findings related to engineering students' collective noticing, defining, and experiencing of social worlds. The findings give a sense of overlapping but distinct social realities among student groups and highlight how failing to meet expectations can contribute to deeply painful emotional responses. We also note when students' responses reproduce, resist, or redefine the broader cultural norms in which the students are embedded. The study has implications for the theoretical exploration of shame, engineering education research on identity and diversity and inclusion, and the messaging and interactions in which the engineering education community engages.

Many engineering education researchers acknowledge that their positionality impacts their research. Practices for reporting positionality vary widely and rarely incorporate a nuanced discussion of the impact of demographic identities on research. Researchers holding marginalized or relatively hidden identities must navigate additional layers regarding transparency of their positionality. We identify ways in which positionality impacts research, with a particular emphasis on demographic identity dimensions. We note that whether identities are relatively marginalized, privileged, hidden, or apparent in a research context creates complexities for conceptualizing, practicing, and disclosing one's positionality. In a collaborative inquiry informed by autoethnography, we assemble positionality reflections of current engineering education researchers to demonstrate the primary ways in which positionality impacts research. We find that positionality impacts six fundamental aspects of research: research topic, epistemology, ontology, methodology, relation to participants, and communication. These aspects of research delve deeper than conceptions of positionality as a methodological limitation, a measure to prevent bias, or a requirement for research quality. The impact of positionality on research is complex, particularly when researchers occupy minoritized identities and for research topics that interrogate power relations between identity groups. By demonstrating the practices of interrogating and representing positionality, we hope to encourage more researchers to represent positionality transparently, thus making researchers' transparency safer for all. We argue that positionality is an important tool for reflecting on and dislocating privilege, particularly when working on equity research.

Quantitative researchers have noted the impact of mentoring and support programming for students from underrepresented groups in engineering. Qualitative researchers have also noted the importance of student agency in persistence through marginalization. Nevertheless, challenges and questions remain in identifying practices which are effective in supporting underrepresented students. The study applies scholarship from critical theory and narrative as a new resource for approaching and understanding the process of supporting marginalized student agency. A longitudinal interview study with a female undergraduate engineering student, Emilia, developed into a way for her to process marginalizing educational experiences and to develop new narratives that expanded her agency. After an in‐depth member check, Emilia became a co‐author contributing a post hoc account of the impact of these discussions. Our analysis indicates that naming one's own oppression and creating narratives that repurpose and resituate stereotypical stories of oppression was a liberatory act for Emilia. We trace three marginalizing themes of the participant's experience that are subverted and resisted through the student co‐constructed narrative. The paper builds theory for diversity support, suggesting critical theorizing may present a new form of agency not yet represented in the literature. It also points to possible value for student participants from qualitative methodologies exploring student experiences. Finally, it suggests supporting critical theorizing as a potential new orientation for diversity practitioners.

To explain educational problems such as student attrition, engineering education literature often focuses on the characteristics of individuals. In 2006, Ray McDermott and Hervé Varenne called for examining the “cultural construction” of educational problems, uncovering how multiple actors create and inscribe meaning to the educational problem. We apply the cultural construction framework to examine how the educational problem of a student being “not cut out for engineering” is constructed within the context of a specific electrical engineering course. We focus on culturally taken-for-granted course structures, practices, and interactions, all of which produce the local enactment of this common educational problem. We used ethnographic methods, including field-noted participant observations, one-on-one participant interviews, and video-recorded student work on lab assignments. Coordinating multiple data streams enabled us to question explanations couched in terms of individual ability and background, and to illustrate how ability hierarchies were constructed in the educational context. Our findings illustrate how several mundane and seemingly innocuous aspects of engineering classrooms add up to construct the educational problem of our focal student as “not cut out” for engineering. Contributions to this construction included lecture seating positions, interactional norms in lecture and lab, and labels made meaningful through institutional and interactional processes. The forces at play in constructing educational problems for students are deeply embedded in institutions, disciplines, and society, making it difficult to generate a simple list of instructional interventions. We highlight cultural construction analysis as a potentially fruitful orientation for researchers and practitioners to find the particular sites and tools for local intervention.