Equal Chances? Not Today in the USA. Not on Your Life.

Today, I mourn for my country. A place where systematic, institutionalized racism reigns strong. 

I’ve always been thankful that I was born after the 1960s racial-awareness raising events that precipitated the 1968 Fair Housing Act, the proclamation in Virginia that interracial marriages were finally legal, and laws that enabled kids of all colors to attend the same public schools.

Incidentally, I was born just after we landed on the moon and after my alma mater, Virginia Tech, started admitting women into fields like architecture. (UVA started this the year I was born.) 

I benefitted from ALL these American achievements and civil rights. 

I was allowed to attend desegregated schools and learn from and with people from all walks of life.

We, as Americans, achieved all this but then we stopped short. We let ourselves believe all things had become equal. We actually kid ourselves into believing that any American-born person can succeed equally based on merit. That we all have an equal chance at birth. 

It simply isn’t true. And we can’t stop trying until it is.

Framing My View

Over time, various artists have provided layers of meanings along this street in Kilkenny, Ireland. Small windows in the graveyard painting let viewers select their own vantage points and help them view what's happening on the other side of the wall. The photographer (Frank Daly) selected his own frame of reference, capturing an entertaining yet  chilling portrayal of the phenomenon of Western burial.

Over time, various artists have provided layers of meanings along this street in Kilkenny, Ireland. Small windows in the graveyard painting let viewers select their own vantage points and help them view what’s happening on the other side of the wall. The photographer (Frank Daly) selected his own frame of reference, capturing an entertaining yet chilling portrayal of the phenomenon of Western burial.

Phenomenology and constructionism are two outlooks for understanding and describing human experience in ways that can help humans (especially educators, designers, and makers) shape a better/more purposeful future. They are well aligned with engineering and architecture because both paradigms both have to do with human creation. Without human creation, architecture and engineering are not possible. In this blog, I’m attempting to summarize my understanding of the two in a way that might be of use to other researchers.

Phenomenology is a philosophy as well as a method of doing research. It focuses on experiences people have, and on how individuals understand and describe their experiences. Education researchers have been working hard to refine this method of research, although it is still in its infancy as a research methodology. On the other hand, phenomenology has been central to architectural thought since at least the mid 1900s.

Today, I am striving to understand distinctions and techniques involved with three specific variants of phenomenology: transcendental phenomenology, hermeneutic/interpretive phenomenology, and phenomenography. These differ in how they view objectivity and subjectivity, and this aspect intrigues me.

Construction is a fundamental aspect of architecture, architectural design, and architectural education. Two distinct paradigms deal explicitly with “construction,” although I see quite a bit of overlap between the two, so I’m placing them under a common heading.

These two construction-related outlooks are called constructivism and social constructionism.

The book Qualitative Research: The Essential Guide to Theory and Practice, written by Maggi Savin-Baden and Claire Howell Major (2013), is helping me better understand the distinctions between these two ways of thinking about and conceptualizing being, knowing, and researching.

I’ll attempt to explain what I’ve found using their book and integrating it into what I learned in school: 

Constructivism is the more subjective of the two construction-oriented paradigms. This paradigm asserts that knowledge exists in the human mind and that researchers can understand it by “unpacking individual experiences” (Savin-Baden & Major, p. 56). “Reality,” in this view, is what individuals think it is. To understand the world, we (as educators, architects, and/or researchers) need to assess how individuals know, understand, and indeed construct the world in their minds.

Constructionism is a more collective. This paradigm is often referred to as “social constructionism” and it posits, “Reality and knowledge are socially constructed” (p. 56). In this view, groups of people decide collectively – and quite often unconsciously – what things (phenomena, people, places, ideas, etc.) they will recognize and how they will understand and name them. In inverse fashion, groups also decide what things they will not see/understand/name. Researchers who adopt this way of seeing the world study how groups of people collectively see/interpret/create/construct the world around them. Today, constructionism appears in only in a few publications on engineering education (specifically, on teaching robotics or materials engineering).

I’ve been planning to use phenomenology in my upcoming work, yet I believe constructionism also hold great value for engineering education research. Perhaps I’ll help introduce this way of seeing to the EER community.

“Objectively” Speaking

Today, those of us doing qualitative research about the education of engineers are enlarging the vocabulary of the engineering community, which has — by and large — thought of research as an objective, fact-finding, technical science.

As Frank Daly commented on an earlier post, engineers are taught to think objectively. Most of the profession has embraced straightforward cause-and-effect logic. This appears to be the case worldwide.

Among researchers, this way of thinking is known as “positivism.” It assumes that there are identifiable facts that stand outside the realm of human intention.

Planning for Sustainability class I conducted at The College of William and Mary.

Discussing water quality in the Planning for Sustainability class I conducted at The College of William and Mary.

Even today, when most people think of research, they imagine test tubes and petri dishes, statistical charts and mathematical equations. They think that science and technology are strictly fact-based.

However, there’s much to be gained by expanding that view — and to learning from what people know, perceive, and experience.

Today, qualitative researchers are designing and describing new ways to conceive of knowledge, new ways to see and explain “things” that happen in the world. They have created many new methods for viewing, studying, and describing phenomena.  Each method fits a specific way of seeing and understanding the world. Each set of ideas about how things work can be called a “paradigm,” and each paradigm filters what various groups of people know and how they come to know it.

Definition of paradigm.

Definition of paradigm.

Everyone uses paradigms (which are sometime also called schemas), although many people are not familiar with the terms and most are not even aware that they have adopted one specific set of ideas without considering alternatives.

That’s like never considering that you could fry, or bake, or broil, or grill fish. Or even eat it raw. Imagine being stuck in just one way of doing things! Yet most of us are when it comes to philosophical ideas, conceptions of knowledge, and how to learn.

By using qualitative methods to study events and engineering-related phenomena, engineering education researchers like myself are helping engineers see things that their traditional way of seeing things masked.

Definition of schema.

Definition of schema.

Steven Feldman of Case Western Reserve University helped do this at NASA. Following the Challenger disaster, Feldman assessed NASA’s organizational culture and he published his findings in 2004. He found evidence that the shared philosophy within NASA led to calamity. There was a pervasive belief in objectivity, fact, and pure physical science. It led people to ignore important issues and it got in the way of success. Employees were so focused on quantitative data that they failed to see gaping holes in their problem-solving structures. He, and others like Zingale and Hummel (2012), have insisted that NASA and other organizations can benefit from qualitative research. These experts want qualitative research to be conducted both by and about NASA. Although the Space Administration studies phenomena, it has been doing so without using qualitative methods, like phenomenology, that could yield significant findings.

I’ll explain some basics of phenomenology as a way of seeing, analyzing, and understanding the world, in an upcoming blog.