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Background: Shame is a deeply painful emotion people feel when they perceive that they have fallen short of socially constructed expectations. In this study, professional shame refers 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. Purpose: 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. Method: 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. Results: 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. Conclusions: 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Background: 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. Purpose: 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. Method: 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. Results: 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. Conclusions: 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]