Professional Engineering Socialization at the Intersection of Collective Constructions of Expectations and Individual Shame Experiences

Background: Prior work has investigated engineering students’ professional formation through the lens of individual experience and from a cultural perspective. The concept of professional shame provides an opportunity to explore students’ experiences of disciplinary expectations as situated in a context of engineering social norms.

Purpose: In this study, we investigated (i) how students experienced subjectively not meeting their internalized expectations of what it means to be and succeed as an engineering student and (ii) their reactions and responses to such experiences and how those experiences manifested in the social context.

Methodology: We conducted 10 focus groups involving 38 total participants. We then coded and qualitatively analyzed focus group transcripts using an ethnographic focus on how students encounter and respond to shame within the cultural context. Our data gathering and analysis was theoretically framed by a model of professional shame as a mediating factor in how students interpreted and eventually co-constructed shared engineering expectations and master narratives during their professional socialization.

Findings: We identified six main patterns of responses to shame that students enacted and that, in turn, interacted to form social norms around expectations. These responses, which emerged as nuanced and context dependent, are: (i) hiding (ii) masking (iii) trivializing shame experiences (iv) emulating perceived success markers (v) suffering passively (vi) legitimizing shame experiences. Our findings also demonstrate a complex interplay between the students’ individual and professional sense of self that significantly impacts professional socialization in engineering.

Conclusions: Shame has emerged as a key mechanism in engineering professional socialization as students’ shame responses influence both their individual identity and the ways they collectively co-produce cultural norms. An awareness of these often-invisible dynamics can enable educators to empathically engage students in ways that allow for vulnerability and struggle while promoting healthy positive development.