Butting Heads: Competition and Posturing in a Paired Programming Team

This Research to Practice Full Paper contributes to the study of undergraduate engineering students’ beliefs and educational experiences. Scholars have documented the educational experiences of students including the marginalization of women and underrepresented racial minority groups. Although the experiences of marginalized groups are likely impacted by privileged and majority student groups, comparatively little research has directly focused on the actions and perspectives of dominant students. Additionally, few studies combine the research methods necessary to examine both student beliefs and classroom actions. In this paper we focus on perspectives and actions of dominant groups which may be linked to marginalization. In particular, we focus on the ways students understand and enact the culture of competition in engineering, which has been linked to marginalizing student experiences and reproduced male demographics. Our study uses ethnographic one-on-one interviews and video-recorded interactions to examine the collaboration and perspectives of two White male students in a 10-person laboratory section of an active learning introductory programming course for electrical engineers. Key findings include students’ posturing about broad academic status and local assignment expertise that seemed to be triggered by prior experience and shared identities. In addition, views of peers as adversaries rather than partners in their work created a competitive interaction which was counterproductive to their learning and work. These findings suggest that students may be triggered into reproducing a competitive masculine engineering culture. Implications for instructors include the possibility that in some cases talking about and reflecting on competitive approaches in lab can potentially shift student behavior.