“What can you Teach me?”: (Re)thinking Responses to Difference for Multidisciplinary Teamwork

Skillful multidisciplinary collaboration will be paramount for engineers working in a global society. Much of their industry work will require that they partner with people from various backgrounds, areas of expertise, gender, ethnicity, etc. Despite the importance of learning about different perspectives relevant to problem solving, it seems that engineers accept difference conditionally. That is, individuals who exhibit ways of thinking, doing, and being that are “outside the norms” of engineering are marginalized within engineering culture. This attitude toward difference may present challenges for engineers when they enter the workplace. Thus, the question becomes how do we adequately prepare engineering students for the diversity of values, ideas, and approaches to problem solving that characterize the workforce? The purpose of this project is to explore the concept of difference as represented through gender. A thematic qualitative analysis of data revealed that engineering students experience dissonance and (re)negotiate their positionality of being an engineer in the presence of difference. These findings not only have implications for how we model interdiciplinarity in the classroom, but more importantly, results from this project show that acceptance of difference is conditional. As educators, we have more work to do to prepare students for the multidisciplinary work that will be required of them as practicing/professional engineers.