Alice Pawley
Alice Pawley is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering Education and an affiliate faculty member in the Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies Program and the Division of Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University.
Prof. Pawley's goal through her work at Purdue is to help people, including the engineering education profession, develop a vision of engineering education as more inclusive, engaged, and socially just. To do this, she believes in saying what needs to be said - to colleagues, students, and the profession as a whole. She sees community as her religion in how she mentors graduate students, engages with colleagues in her local department, seeks collaborations with colleagues across disciplines and across the country, and engages actively as a citizen in local, state, and national progressive politics. She believes that waste - of anything, including time, energy, effort, or materials - is a form a disrespect to oneself and others, and strives to use organizational systems to better focus both her and her students' attention on doing this important work together. She also believes that noticing daily details about people's lives honours us all as human beings, and shows this through getting curious about students and colleagues' lives to recognize the realities everyone is dealing with as we come to do our work together. It is through these core values that Prof. Pawley tries to embody and advance a more inclusive, engaged, and socially just vision of engineering education.
She was co-PI of Purdue’s ADVANCE program from 2008-2014, focusing on the underrepresentation of women in STEM faculty positions. She runs the Feminist Research in Engineering Education (FREE, formerly RIFE, group), whose diverse projects and group members are described at feministengineering.org. She received a CAREER award in 2010 and a PECASE award in 2012 for her project researching the stories of undergraduate engineering women and men of color and white women. She has received ASEE-ERM’s best paper award for her CAREER research, and the Denice Denton Emerging Leader award from the Anita Borg Institute, both in 2013. She helped found, fund, and grow the PEER Collaborative, a peer mentoring group of early career and recently tenured faculty and research staff primarily evaluated based on their engineering education research productivity. She can be contacted by email at apawley@purdue.edu.
Supervisors: Michael J. Smith and Sarah K. A. Pfatteicher
Phone: 765-496-1209
Address: 1325 Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering
701 W. Stadium Ave
West Lafayette, IN 47907
Prof. Pawley's goal through her work at Purdue is to help people, including the engineering education profession, develop a vision of engineering education as more inclusive, engaged, and socially just. To do this, she believes in saying what needs to be said - to colleagues, students, and the profession as a whole. She sees community as her religion in how she mentors graduate students, engages with colleagues in her local department, seeks collaborations with colleagues across disciplines and across the country, and engages actively as a citizen in local, state, and national progressive politics. She believes that waste - of anything, including time, energy, effort, or materials - is a form a disrespect to oneself and others, and strives to use organizational systems to better focus both her and her students' attention on doing this important work together. She also believes that noticing daily details about people's lives honours us all as human beings, and shows this through getting curious about students and colleagues' lives to recognize the realities everyone is dealing with as we come to do our work together. It is through these core values that Prof. Pawley tries to embody and advance a more inclusive, engaged, and socially just vision of engineering education.
She was co-PI of Purdue’s ADVANCE program from 2008-2014, focusing on the underrepresentation of women in STEM faculty positions. She runs the Feminist Research in Engineering Education (FREE, formerly RIFE, group), whose diverse projects and group members are described at feministengineering.org. She received a CAREER award in 2010 and a PECASE award in 2012 for her project researching the stories of undergraduate engineering women and men of color and white women. She has received ASEE-ERM’s best paper award for her CAREER research, and the Denice Denton Emerging Leader award from the Anita Borg Institute, both in 2013. She helped found, fund, and grow the PEER Collaborative, a peer mentoring group of early career and recently tenured faculty and research staff primarily evaluated based on their engineering education research productivity. She can be contacted by email at apawley@purdue.edu.
Supervisors: Michael J. Smith and Sarah K. A. Pfatteicher
Phone: 765-496-1209
Address: 1325 Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering
701 W. Stadium Ave
West Lafayette, IN 47907
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Papers by Alice Pawley
Careful observation serves to identify productive routes to inquiry so as to move the researcher towards understanding relationships present within the social environment defined by the question. Because this methodology can call attention to both desirable and problematic relationships, results from this methodology can inform individual research agendas, program assessment, and policy creation by enabling researchers to construct a map of social situations.Specifically, this methodology builds on the tradition of flexible design characterized by question asking, good listening, adaptiveness and flexibility, grasp of the issues, and lack of bias and relies on anthropological techniques of domain analysis. We present domain analysis as an iterative four-step method:
1. Locate a social environment to observe.
2. Decide what evidence already present in that environment helps you answer your question.
3. Identify inter-relationships between the evidence.
4. Organize these relationships according to a question tree.
This paper explains these four steps within the context of engineering education research, with specific examples relating to our ongoing investigation of how engineering education researchers research gender. This paper is explicitly about our method; describing our data in detail is outside the scope of this paper. This research method provides important insights needed to design engineering education research agendas both at the individual and community level.
Our goal is to illustrate how oral history and participatory research are effective methods to:
1) identify women’s career pathways into STEM faculty;
2) compare and contrast career pathways to climate and pipeline metaphors as well as discover new metaphors;
3) identify critical points in women’s career pathways; and
4) discover new information about women’s paths into STEM faculty.
We describe early results from a set of semi-structured interviews of women faculty in STEM disciplines collected as part of research done through an ADVANCE grant, a NSF- funded project intended to achieve improved career success for women faculty in STEM disciplines. Interviews begin with oral histories that give context, depth, and structure to women’s pathways into STEM faculty careers. Through participatory research methods, we tell participants the goals of the research and ask them to discuss, challenge, and suggest ways institutions may improve career success for women STEM faculty. Taken together, career pathways are modeled and compared with chilly climate and pipeline models. This innovative methodological approach will inform policy, recruitment procedures, and ways to retain women faculty.
Institutional ethnography (IE) is a method used in sociology to understand the experiences of marginalized people in different kinds of institutions. Operationalized by sociologist Dorothy Smith, IE allows researchers to examine how institutions’ rules and regulations impact the lives and work experiences of people who work in those institutions. The main data collection processes for IE are interviews, discursive analyses of organizational texts and documents, and observations to study institutional members’ interactions with these same texts and policies. Researchers focus on how institutional participants understand, perceive, and negotiate institutional rules and how those understandings and negotiations affects their personal and professional successes.
In this paper, we outline how IE is an effective method of investigating the experiences of women in STEM faculty positions. We describe IE’s use as a research method within the ADVANCE-Purdue project. ADVANCE-Purdue is a NSF-sponsored project that aims to improve the job success of faculty, with a particular focus on women of color, in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines of Purdue University. Using IE as a method to study the career-based experiences of the women faculty members of the STEM disciplines, we ask how institutionally generated texts (at the departmental, college, and university levels) shape their experiences as faculty members.
In this paper we describe the content analysis method by which we processed these historical data, and some of the conclusions we have drawn about women’s identities as engineers as portrayed through historical public sources drawn from 1900-1980 with a focus on the 1950s and 1960s.
Careful observation serves to identify productive routes to inquiry so as to move the researcher towards understanding relationships present within the social environment defined by the question. Because this methodology can call attention to both desirable and problematic relationships, results from this methodology can inform individual research agendas, program assessment, and policy creation by enabling researchers to construct a map of social situations.Specifically, this methodology builds on the tradition of flexible design characterized by question asking, good listening, adaptiveness and flexibility, grasp of the issues, and lack of bias and relies on anthropological techniques of domain analysis. We present domain analysis as an iterative four-step method:
1. Locate a social environment to observe.
2. Decide what evidence already present in that environment helps you answer your question.
3. Identify inter-relationships between the evidence.
4. Organize these relationships according to a question tree.
This paper explains these four steps within the context of engineering education research, with specific examples relating to our ongoing investigation of how engineering education researchers research gender. This paper is explicitly about our method; describing our data in detail is outside the scope of this paper. This research method provides important insights needed to design engineering education research agendas both at the individual and community level.
Our goal is to illustrate how oral history and participatory research are effective methods to:
1) identify women’s career pathways into STEM faculty;
2) compare and contrast career pathways to climate and pipeline metaphors as well as discover new metaphors;
3) identify critical points in women’s career pathways; and
4) discover new information about women’s paths into STEM faculty.
We describe early results from a set of semi-structured interviews of women faculty in STEM disciplines collected as part of research done through an ADVANCE grant, a NSF- funded project intended to achieve improved career success for women faculty in STEM disciplines. Interviews begin with oral histories that give context, depth, and structure to women’s pathways into STEM faculty careers. Through participatory research methods, we tell participants the goals of the research and ask them to discuss, challenge, and suggest ways institutions may improve career success for women STEM faculty. Taken together, career pathways are modeled and compared with chilly climate and pipeline models. This innovative methodological approach will inform policy, recruitment procedures, and ways to retain women faculty.
Institutional ethnography (IE) is a method used in sociology to understand the experiences of marginalized people in different kinds of institutions. Operationalized by sociologist Dorothy Smith, IE allows researchers to examine how institutions’ rules and regulations impact the lives and work experiences of people who work in those institutions. The main data collection processes for IE are interviews, discursive analyses of organizational texts and documents, and observations to study institutional members’ interactions with these same texts and policies. Researchers focus on how institutional participants understand, perceive, and negotiate institutional rules and how those understandings and negotiations affects their personal and professional successes.
In this paper, we outline how IE is an effective method of investigating the experiences of women in STEM faculty positions. We describe IE’s use as a research method within the ADVANCE-Purdue project. ADVANCE-Purdue is a NSF-sponsored project that aims to improve the job success of faculty, with a particular focus on women of color, in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines of Purdue University. Using IE as a method to study the career-based experiences of the women faculty members of the STEM disciplines, we ask how institutionally generated texts (at the departmental, college, and university levels) shape their experiences as faculty members.
In this paper we describe the content analysis method by which we processed these historical data, and some of the conclusions we have drawn about women’s identities as engineers as portrayed through historical public sources drawn from 1900-1980 with a focus on the 1950s and 1960s.