An engineer, for what? On the different invitations a university extends to its students to acquire a professional identity

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.