What Portfolio Construction Efforts Reveal About Students’ Search For Engineering Identity

With the desire to contribute to both the research and practice of improving engineering education, we set out to explore portfolios as a curricular intervention to help students integrate engineering content knowledge. Unexpectedly, our data have been helping us see the significance of the identity work students do in creating portfolios. Students built their portfolios through a semi-structured curriculum. Each week students sought to further describe their preparedness as an engineer and we gathered data, primarily interviews, from participants. After undergoing coding and inter-rater reliability tests, three themes of identity work emerged: portfolio construction impacting students’ engineering identity, skills and abilities as a prominent basis for determining engineering affiliation strength, and how portfolio construction may provide students moments of fruitful uncertainty in terms of their personal agency in managing their own identity. This paper illustrates those three themes through two students as cases in identity work. We articulate our understanding through a framework provided by Gee that categorizes identity in four ways: affinity, institutional, discourse, and natural.