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WEEDON 4.pdf (999.68 KB)

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Attending Like an Engineer: Rhetoric, Design, and Professionalization

Weedon, Jonathan Scott, Weedon
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1466168910

Abstract Details

2016, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, English.
"Attending like an Engineer: Rhetoric, Design and Professionalization" is an ethnography of an engineering design course and a group of engineering students. This IRB- approved study consists of observations of the design course, 9 hours of audio-taped interviews with students and their professor, and 21 hours of videotaped student group work. The class I observed introduced students to the design process and rendered many of the constraints professional engineers work under as part of that process. By analyzing the data in light of rhetorical theory and theories of embodied cognition, I argue that the process of professionalizing student engineers into professional engineers is a practice of directing and training the students attention through learning design and learning to write. At base, the class has students engage in design work not to produce a product or a process, but to cultivate and display attention to the ways professional engineering work is carried out. Students come to attend to engineering problems not as textbook problems, but as problems that are thoroughly intertwined with real-world constraints. Students take up and contest the professional attention they are taught and bring it to bear on how they frame design problems; how they make judgments in the design process; and how they compose the genres of professional engineering. My study offers three important findings for technical communication, engineering education, and writing in the disciplines: 1) genre work introduces students to the economy of a profession's activities by composing texts that mediate and filter design efforts; 2) learning through design is a dynamic rather than transmissive process, where received disciplinary knowledge is contested and negotiated in the emergent embodied and social order of teamwork; 3) and a focus on how students are taught to attend closes the gap between learning to write like a professional and learning to think like a professional. Attending means selecting, structuring, and displaying disciplinary knowledge, forming a profession's practice and domain of scrutiny.
T. Kenny Fountain (Committee Chair)
Todd Oakley (Committee Member)
Kim Emmons (Committee Member)
Sunniva Collins (Committee Member)
204 p.
Engineering; Rhetoric; Technical Communication

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Weedon, Weedon, J. S. (2016). Attending Like an Engineer: Rhetoric, Design, and Professionalization [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1466168910

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Weedon, Weedon, Jonathan. Attending Like an Engineer: Rhetoric, Design, and Professionalization . 2016. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1466168910.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Weedon, Weedon, Jonathan. "Attending Like an Engineer: Rhetoric, Design, and Professionalization ." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1466168910

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

case1466168910
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© 2016, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies and OhioLINK.