“Okay We’re Doing My Idea”: How Students Enact Epistemic Agency and Power in a Design-Based Engineering Context

Abstract

Science and engineering practices are intended to engage students authentically in the work that scientists and engineers do in order to provide opportunities for meaningful engagement in disciplinary work, including design-based learning. Meaningful engagement, particularly for sensemaking purposes, requires a shift in who is leading the classroom community’s intellectual work, from the teacher to the students. When students are positioned with the intellectual responsibility of producing and evaluating ideas, there is potential for them to act with epistemic agency. Enacting epistemic agency involves socially negotiated framing and power dynamics. The purpose of this study is to determine the ways in which gendered power dynamics influence the negotiation of epistemic agency in a design-based learning context. Using a qualitative case study methodology, student negotiations of epistemic and positional framing from a mixed-gender group were observed. Transcripts from their discourse during two design challenges were mapped, and focal group interviews were holistically analyzed to understand students’ perceptions and navigation of epistemic and positional framings in a design-based learning context and to understand how power dynamics influence these negotiations. Students understood the epistemic goals of the design challenges to involve designing solutions to real-world problems. During the first challenge, the group distributed positions of epistemic authority among the members. However, the group experienced a change in composition, resulting in changed power dynamics and epistemic oppression. These findings have implications regarding the critical impact that classroom culture and interactional practices might have on students’ epistemic agency, especially considering their multiple identity markers.

1. Introduction

With the publication of A Framework for K-12 Science Education (National Research Council, 2012), efforts to provide meaningful opportunities for learning in science have become paramount in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and national science standards. In particular, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead States, 2013) are designed to engage students in science and engineering practices (SEPs). The SEPs (e.g., arguing from evidence, designing solutions) are intended to engage students authentically in the work that scientists and engineers do in order to provide opportunities for meaningful participation in science and engineering. Importantly, learning involves more than the passive accumulation of facts; learning requires the construction of knowledge through meaningful engagement in SEPs to make sense of natural phenomena and the designed world (Berland et al., 2016; Haverly et al., 2020). This is particularly salient in design-based learning (DBL) contexts, where students engage in SEPs for targeted learning and design goals, including understanding phenomena and finding solutions to design problems.

Meaningful engagement and sensemaking in DBL requires a shift in intellectual work to the students (e.g., Berland et al., 2016; Penuel, 2016). Berland and her colleagues (2016) argue that meaningful engagement in SEPs relies on two aspects: (i) student adoption of the epistemic goals of their work, including knowledge construction, and (ii) student understandings of how to engage in that work epistemically. When students are positioned within the classroom community with the responsibility of producing and evaluating ideas, and they take up this positioning, they act with epistemic agency (e.g., Arnold & Clarke, 2014; Ko & Krist, 2019; Rusk & Rønning, 2020). When epistemic agents, or those who are positioned with and enact epistemic agency, make sense of a problem and design solutions, they do more than just constructing knowledge; they use various criteria to evaluate knowledge and decide which solutions or ideas they should pursue (Baze et al., 2023). To understand student sensemaking, it is important to understand how they take up epistemic agency. The SEP of argumentation serves as a useful research context for assessing epistemic agency because it offers opportunities to observe students justifying, evaluating, and taking up ideas, thereby offering verbal and textual information about the ways in which they enact epistemic agency (González-Howard & McNeill, 2020).

Previous work (González-Howard et al., 2024) has examined the ways that middle school students understood their participation in argumentation and the epistemic agency they exhibited in an engineering DBL context. Findings from this work suggest that group composition played an important role in student epistemic agency. Other authors have also noted that group composition, particularly with regard to gender, influences collaboration and power dynamics (e.g., Bennett et al., 2010; Due, 2014; Patterson, 2019; Schnittka & Schnittka, 2016). Middle school represents a particularly important time for adolescent STEM students because most students by this time hold negative stereotypes of girls and women in STEM (e.g., Master et al., 2017; Riegle-Crumb & Morton, 2017; Wieselmann et al., 2020). Therefore, the purpose of this study is to build from this work by examining the ways in which students interact within a mixed-gender group to negotiate positional framing and authority, the epistemic framing of the purpose of their work, and their roles and agency in that work during engineering design challenges.

Positionality Statement

I, the first author (C.B.), am a white woman with a background in STEM education, specifically secondary and postsecondary biology teaching. This greatly influences my interest in feminist research and examining issues of power in STEM education contexts. As a K-12 student, I showed great aptitude in math and engineering, but I rejected opportunities to study engineering; that was something “the boys” did, and I was a “biology person”. This stereotype threat and “lost potential” (Aschbacher et al., 2010) has led me to an interest in better understanding the experiences of girls in engineering.

I am a pragmatic constructivist. I assume that to understand learning, we must observe the students as they participate in activities. And to understand the students’ own perspectives, we must ask them about it. This study is a part of my dissertation and was conducted in the context of a larger, NSF-funded project (award #1607916) on which I worked as a graduate research assistant. The methods reflect those of a beginner researcher trying to carve out a study of interest from pre-defined research goals. Here, specifically, I use qualitative case study methods to leverage the voices of the participants, both as they engage in the design challenges and through focus group interviews. Finally, in this manuscript, I use “we” to refer to all authors because, while I have led the writing of this manuscript and it is my dissertation work, my co-authors have been instrumental in my conceptualization and operation of the work.

2. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framing of this study is constructed from three primary lines of reasoning: (i) framing is used to examine students’ goals, actions, and agency; (ii) gendered power dynamics can lead to epistemic exclusion and oppression; and (iii) examining student argumentation can reveal students’ negotiations of power and agency. These are described below and integrated into a mechanism by which epistemic agency is understood in this study, especially as it relates to students’ sensemaking work in an argument-driven engineering DBL context.

2.1. Positional and Epistemic Framing for Examining Epistemic Agency

We use framing, or the students’ sense of what is going on (Berland & Hammer, 2012; Goffman, 1974; Ha & Kim, 2021), to make sense of the ways in which students participate in design challenges. Specifically, we examine both epistemic and positional framing (Greeno, 2009; Shim & Kim, 2018; van de Sande & Greeno, 2012). We consider epistemic framing as the students’ sense of why they engage in a task, or what the purpose or goal of a task is, in regard to knowledge. Epistemic framing is socially negotiated around the roles students take up and ranges from procedurally “doing the lesson” to highly engaged sensemaking, or “doing engineering” (Jiménez-Aleixandre et al., 2000; Berland & Hammer, 2012). These goals are often implicit and can vary from a teacher’s intended goals for an activity (Berland et al., 2016); it is therefore important to examine what the students understand the purpose of their work to be and how their participation aligns with that purpose.

The ways that students participate within a group relates to positional framing, or the sense of what their roles are and what is expected of themselves and their group mates (Greeno, 2009; Ha & Kim, 2021; van de Sande & Greeno, 2012). Positional framing, like epistemic framing, is socially negotiated and dynamic. In the context of this study, positional framing influences who is positioned as a source of valuable ideas and a decision-maker and who is positioned as a listener or in less authoritative roles, such as scribes or builders. In group activities, the positional and epistemic framing within the group are developed through group discourse and negotiations of what the group considers to be important or how they interpret the task (Berland & Reiser, 2011).

Positional framing is relevant to the current study because epistemic agency involves the negotiation of the roles that students take up when working toward an epistemic goal. Greeno (2009), for example, highlights the connection between positional framing and epistemic agency when he describes the negotiation of roles as an enactive process, where a person understands themselves as an important actor (or agent) within a situation. According to Greeno (2009), this process requires “a deeper, more embodied level of processing” (MacWhinney, 2005, p. 199). Here, we examine the enactment of epistemic agency within student groups as they negotiate both the epistemic goals of the activity and their positions within that activity.

2.2. Gendered Power Dynamics and Epistemic Oppression

Negative stereotypes about women in engineering are held by children as young as six years old (Master et al., 2017), and girls hold negative perceptions of themselves in STEM by middle school (Kinzie, 2007; Nazar et al., 2019). These stereotypes persist into secondary school, influencing girls’ decisions to pursue STEM fields (Riegle-Crumb & Morton, 2017). Secondary and undergraduate engineering classroom culture has been documented to involve male-dominated spaces through male students dominating discussion and intellectual participation (Schnittka & Schnittka, 2016; Stonyer, 2002). Interactional feminism, wherein the discursive interactions between students and genders is analyzed, especially when exploring the reproduction of masculine dominance in engineering, is recommended as an important theoretical framing for engineering education research by Beddoes and Borrego (2011). The use of this framing is intended to guide our analysis around how students talk and engage with others of the same and different genders and how gendered values and power structures are expressed in these interactions. These interactions are reflected in dialogue as students work in groups to solve design challenges and negotiate structures of power and epistemic agency.

Specifically, we frame our study around the concepts of epistemic justice (Fricker, 2007) and epistemic oppression (Dotson, 2014; Fricker, 1999; Pohlhaus, 2020). Epistemic justice refers to the ways that someone is treated specifically in regard to their role as a knower. When someone is treated negatively or wronged because of their knowledge or knowledge-building practices, they experience epistemic injustice. Similarly, epistemic oppression is the persistent exclusion of one’s knowledge to the extent that it hinders their learning and infringes on their epistemic agency. Both of these constructs go beyond someone being considered unintelligent or uniformed as an individual, but refer to the ways that their very ways of thinking, knowing, and doing are different and therefore less valuable. In essence, we are interested in understanding whose ideas about an engineering challenge as well as about the engineering design process are valued and upheld or devalued and excluded (see also Baze & González-Howard, 2025). Because of the male-dominated nature of engineering, it can be reasonably expected that masculine hegemony (Due, 2014) may result in the epistemic oppression of girls, women, and gender minorities in engineering design contexts.

2.3. Negotiating Power and Epistemic Agency Through Argumentation

Authentic engagement in science and engineering involves meaningful participation in SEPs (National Research Council, 2012; NGSS Lead States, 2013). This work focuses on the SEP of argumentation because argumentation is an important practice for making sense of problems and designing solutions (e.g., Cunningham & Carlsen, 2014; Kelly & Licona, 2018; Wilson-Lopez et al., 2020). Argumentation is also a discursive, social, and goal-oriented practice by which scientific knowledge is constructed and evaluated (Berland & Reiser, 2009, 2011; Kolstø & Ratcliffe, 2007). When students argue in design contexts, they discuss claims or solutions (e.g., design concepts, prototypes) and justify their ideas with scientific principles, evidence, and the parameters of the design (e.g., Gainsburg et al., 2016; Wilson-Lopez et al., 2020). Thus, student engagement in argumentation provides opportunities to observe the ways in which students interact and talk about their ideas, offering verbal and textual information about the ways in which they enact their epistemic agency. But, more importantly, argumentation both supports student epistemic agency by structuring their idea generation and evaluation and also offers opportunities for students to socially negotiate their epistemic roles within a group.

The theoretical framework used in this study can be summarized by a proposed mechanism whereby students socially negotiate positions of power and enact epistemic agency by collaboratively engaging in argumentation (González-Howard & McNeill, 2020). We attempt to uncover this mechanism by examining students’ talk relating to epistemic and positional framing, their participation in argumentation, and their verbal social dynamics during group engineering design work.

3. Literature Review

This review of relevant literature is structured around (i) the ways epistemic agency and epistemic oppression have been conceptualized and observed and (ii) how engagement in argumentation can support student framing and epistemic agency. This study seeks to bridge the gaps between framing, power, and agency, which are not well developed in the literature and are particularly lacking in engineering and DBL contexts. Because the majority of the existing research has occurred within the context of science, not engineering, here, we summarize the available research across science and engineering to form a more complete picture of the literature.

3.1. Epistemic Agency in STEM Education

While epistemic agency has been understood in STEM education in various ways, we conceptualize epistemic agency as a positioning of responsibility or authority for shaping or defining what counts as knowledge in a classroom community (Kawasaki & Sandoval, 2019; Lo, 2016; Stroupe, 2014). We consider how epistemic agency is a negotiated construct related to collaborative knowledge-building, seen in the action or inaction of a student contributing to group participation (Ko & Krist, 2019), or a group’s collaborative actions around knowledge building (Stroupe et al., 2018; Zimmerman & Weible, 2018). Specifically, we conceptualize the enactment of epistemic agency in engineering contexts as the ways in which students present their ideas and solutions; justify their ideas and solutions using evidence, disciplinary core ideas, and criteria and constraints of design challenges; acknowledge, value, and use each other’s ideas; and develop shared understandings of their design solutions (e.g., González-Howard et al., 2024; Miller et al., 2018; Stroupe, 2014; Wilson-Lopez et al., 2018).

The ways that epistemic agency has been observed in the STEM education literature include student ownership and sharing of ideas and contributions to investigations or knowledge building. Stroupe (2014) found that science students often publicly shared their ideas and that there were a high number of ideas publicly considered in the classroom when teachers positioned the students as epistemic agents. Ko and Krist (2019) observed agentive students participating in science lessons by proposing new ideas to investigate, proposing alternate explanations, and continuing to draw on the anchoring phenomenon even while discussing a new phenomenon. Similarly, Holmes et al. (2020) studied undergraduate intervention students as they engaged in physics lab activities as decision-making agents by “[recording] decisions and justifications about their experimental plan, [reflecting] on and [responding] to their experiment while executing their plan, and [reflecting] on their results to propose and carry-out improvements” (p. 11). Together, these studies show that epistemic agency in STEM contexts has been assessed in different ways; the research generally centers around student contributions to and active engagement in investigations.

However, this research has a focus on the shifting of epistemic agency from the teacher to the students and teacher–student negotiations of epistemic roles without attention to negotiations among students. Few studies have examined student–student interactions. Those that have been published have found that enactment of epistemic agency is considered equitable when all students in a group have opportunities to participate as epistemic agents (e.g., Ha & Kim, 2021; Pino-Pasternak et al., 2018). Alternatively, polarization in the enactment of epistemic agency may occur when one or more students’ ideas are devalued. Looking outside of STEM education, we can surmise that polarization may happen when one or more students experience epistemic injustice or oppression from their peers or teacher (Dotson, 2014; Fricker, 1999; Pohlhaus, 2020).

To date, there has been extremely limited research examining epistemic justice or epistemic oppression in STEM education; what work has been conducted exists in higher education contexts (Settles et al., 2021; Pearson et al., 2024). In addition, most studies of epistemic agency do not examine students’ perceptions of their roles (González-Howard et al., 2024) and whether or not students think their participation is meaningful to their sensemaking (Berland et al., 2016; Miller et al., 2018). As such, a gap in the literature exists regarding issues of power underlying conceptualizations of epistemic agency as interactional negotiation of sensemaking roles; specifically, whose knowledge and knowledge-building practices are positioned above others or excluded and oppressed, particularly in the context of engineering design learning?

3.2. Framing and Agency Through Argumentation

Student engagement in scientific argumentation offers a rich context for analyses of framing and power negotiations. When students dialectically argue, they socially negotiate their epistemic roles as knowledge producers and evaluators as they develop, share, and justify their ideas (Kolstø & Ratcliffe, 2007). Epistemic roles refer to the positions and responsibilities students may take up when making sense of phenomena or problems, which may range from following procedures (e.g., technicians) to shaping the epistemic practices of a community or group (i.e., agents) (Stroupe et al., 2018).

A number of key studies have shown that agency is negotiated among the students themselves and that engaging in argumentation provides opportunities for students to negotiate positions of epistemic authority (Chen, 2020; Engle et al., 2014). The student positioning of authority influences how their peers evaluate the quality of an idea and decide who had influence in the classroom (Engle et al., 2014). Students positioned with more epistemic authority, such as those with the highest academic achievement, have larger impacts on the group’s power dynamics, suggesting that students in positions of power and authority guide the epistemic practices of the group. (González-Howard & McNeill, 2020; Shim & Kim, 2018). In these cases, the “authoritative” students hold positions of greater epistemic agency. However, productive collaboration occurs when group members are intentional about facilitating equitable participation and take turns regulating the discussion (Ha & Kim, 2021; Pino-Pasternak et al., 2018).

3.3. Summary of Literature

These studies exemplify the ways in which students negotiate positions of epistemic authority and agency through dialectic argumentation and how this can be polarizing—with one or a few students acting with agency—or collaborative—with the whole group contributing to discussion and enacting shared epistemic agency. Although argumentation has been noted as an important practice for meaningful student engagement in science and engineering (e.g., National Research Council, 2012; NGSS Lead States, 2013), very little is known about the relationship between argumentation and epistemic agency, especially in engineering and DBL contexts. We argue that a productive approach to examining this relationship is through positional and epistemic framing, especially in considering gendered power dynamics and epistemic oppression.

4. Research Questions

Esmonde (2016) noted that “power remains under-theorized in the [learning sciences] field” (p. 12) and that “power is made visible in the ways social relations between people enable some forms of agency, and constrain others” (p. 21). The need for analyses of power in sociocultural learning studies has been echoed by others (e.g., Due, 2014; Miller et al., 2018). It is therefore important to examine how students interact and navigate power structures within groups in order to understand negotiations of agency. Furthermore, there is a need for research examining students’ navigation of positional and epistemic framing in argumentation and especially engineering contexts. In particular, students’ own perspectives of their epistemic roles have rarely been examined (González-Howard et al., 2024). This work examines how middle school students participate in mixed-gender groups to design solutions to problems and how gendered power dynamics influence students’ navigation of epistemic and positional framing. Therefore, this study is guided by the following research questions:

• How do students understand and navigate positional and epistemic framings while participating in argument-driven engineering design challenges?
• How do interactions between group members and their reflections reveal gendered power dynamics?

5. Methods

This qualitative case study seeks to describe the enactment of epistemic agency by a group of students by analyzing student positional and epistemic framing and epistemic oppression through their dialog during activities and a focus group interview. This research was approved by the local university’s Institutional Review Board.

5.1. Context

This study took place in an eighth-grade science classroom in a large, urban public middle school in Texas in DeLorean Middle School (DMS; all names and places are pseudonyms) during the 2018–2019 academic year. The demographic breakdown of DMS students is approximately 35% white, 38% Hispanic, 15% African American, 8% Asian or Pacific Islander, less than 1% Native American, and 3% two or more races; about 35% of students are identified as economically disadvantaged and 7% are English language learners. The teacher of this class, Mr. Martin, was a participant in a larger research project to develop and implement an integrated engineering instructional model called Argument-Driven Engineering (ADE; see Baze et al., 2018; Hutner et al., 2019). Mr. Martin is a white man, who had 25 years teaching experience at the time.

The ADE framework engages students in DBL through problem identification, problem solving, and prototype design and testing, and requires students to effectively communicate and collaborate on project management. ADE consists of eight stages representing the engineering design process along with intentional and explicit argumentation opportunities (Figure 1). Because the focus of this study is on student engagement in argumentation, our analysis is centered on stages which involve informal, discursive argumentation, specifically Stage 3, Concept Selection. During Stage 3, students share their individual design concepts, which they developed during Stage 2. As a group, students then discuss how each design concept meets the criteria and constraints of the challenge, ranking their concepts to select which one they will move forward with. These discussions often involved informal, organic argumentation as students presented their proposed solutions (made claims), justified them using the parameters of the design, acknowledged and evaluated ideas, and sometimes built on one another’s ideas to combine concepts. Given the conceptualizations of epistemic agency for this study, these conversations are rich opportunities for students to develop and display their epistemic agency.

Mr. Martin was involved in the development of the ADE framework as well as the curricular units, called STEM Design Challenges (SDCs), and participated in multiple professional development training sessions in preparation for facilitating the SDCs using the ADE framework. Importantly, this district is an adopter of Argument-Driven Inquiry (e.g., Sampson et al., 2011; Walker et al., 2012), a similar instructional model, and the teachers and students were familiar with the scientific practice of argumentation. The first SDC, “Vaccine Storage Containers,” was completed in September–October 2018. For this challenge, students are introduced to the need for a passive storage device to keep vaccines cold without refrigeration, such as in rural or infrastructure-poor areas. They use scientific ideas about thermal energy, heat transfer, and thermal conductivity to build containers to keep vaccine proxies below 10 °C for 24 h. “Crash Safety Barriers,” the last SDC, was completed in February 2019. Students use scientific ideas about compression and Newton’s Third Law to design a barrier that reduces the force of impact from a cart on a ramp by at least 80%. This challenge is based on the need for road safety measures external to the car so that all consumers, regardless of the ability to purchase a new car, can be made safer. The implementation of this SDC coincided with state standardized testing and teacher professional development days, resulting in non-sequential days spent on the design stages and several shortened class schedules. We examined the first and last SDCs in order to look at early negotiations of framing and, over time, evidence of established or changed positions of power and agency.

5.2. Participants

One focal group was observed in Mr. Martin’s first period eighth-grade science class. These included five students total (

Table 1. Mr. Martin’s focal group students.

Student	Gender	Race/Ethnicity	Primary Language Spoken at Home
Kai	Female	Asian/Pacific Islander	English
Benny	Male	White	English
Bernadine	Female	White	English
Lacey 1	Female	White	English
Jeremy 1	Male	White	English

¹ Lacey was a member of this group only during the Vaccine Storage Container SDC, while Jeremy was a member only during the Crash Safety Barrier SDC.

). We chose this group because of its mixed-gender composition, the availability of robust data, and the presence of interesting dynamics to highlight different power structures. Importantly, the group underwent a change for the final SDC; Lacey was removed from the group to work with another group, and Jeremy was moved into the focal group. In addition, this group was also examined in previous studies (Baze et al., 2023; González-Howard et al., 2024).

5.3. Data Sources and Collection

Groupwork was video- and audio-recorded during the first and last SDCs. Recordings of student discourse from Stage 3 of each SDC were transcribed for coding, as these stages involve student discourse around design decisions and knowledge construction, especially in regard to ideas, knowledge products, and the use of design parameters and evidence to justify decisions. The first author, as a frequent observer in both classrooms, reviewed the externally developed transcripts alongside video recordings to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the transcripts and make note of important non-verbal actions by students or the teacher.

In addition, a focus group interview was conducted in May 2019 and was also transcribed (transcript accuracy was verified alongside audio recordings of the interviews). This interview was performed with the original members of the group during the first SDC (Lacey was included but Jeremy was not). Questions included what the students thought the goals of the SDCs were, the specific roles they took up, and the contributions they made. These questions were intended to gain an understanding of students’ perceptions of their actions and the goals of the SDCs to primarily address the first research question. Both data sources were considered according to the self-identified gender of each participant (boy, girl, or other).

5.4. Analysis

The analysis of both data sources informs each research question, though findings related to RQ1 primarily draw from the focus group interview, while findings related to RQ2 primarily draw from student discourse during the SDCs. To analyze the focus group interview, we holistically examined transcripts of the interviews and developed analytic memos (Saldaña, 2016) based on what we saw that was relevant to the research questions. For RQ1 specifically, we looked for evidence of students’ epistemic framing of the goals of the SDCs, their positioning around their roles, and their perceptions of their contributions toward these goals. These noticings from the interviews were triangulated with observational data from student discourse transcripts to address RQ1. In particular, we looked for evidence of the types of epistemic roles students took on, whether students considered their roles to be more procedural or agentive (Stroupe et al., 2018), and to explain patterns in student interactions and power dynamics.

To examine gendered power dynamics (RQ2), we created event maps (Kelly, 2016; Patterson, 2019) from transcripts of student discourse as they participated in Stage 3—Concept Selection—of the first and last SDCs. Sequences were selected to reveal interpersonal dynamics and show student activity around positional and epistemic framing and how this changes over time as students participate in several SDCs. Specifically, we highlight instances where group members collaborated well or failed to do so and instances of epistemic exclusion (Dotson, 2014; Settles et al., 2021), disempowerment, or empowerment (Carr, 2003). These instances are triangulated with interview data to help to explain patterns.

Through both analyses, we looked for ways in which gender or power dynamics may have influenced students’ interactions and positional or epistemic framing. These methods are intended to provide a rich understanding of how students understand the goals of their work and the roles they take up in groups.

6. Findings and Discussion

In this section, we address each research question by presenting findings drawn from observational and interview data and providing discussions of the findings in light of the theoretical framework and literature review. In examining the epistemic and positional framing of students, we first report and discuss the epistemic goals of the SDCs as students understand them and the positions or roles that students believed they took up to work toward those goals. Then, we expand upon that understanding to describe the ways power was taken up or distributed within groups and how gender influenced the groups’ activity. Two primary takeaways emerged from this study: (i) the group shifted their epistemic and positional framings from collaborative problem solving in the first SDC to polarized positions of authority and a loss of authentic problem solving goals in the last SDC, and (ii) gendered power dynamics may have played a substantial role in this framing shift.

6.1. How Do Students Understand and Navigate Positional and Epistemic Framings While Participating in Argument-Driven Engineering Design Challenges?

Agency and argumentation are goal-oriented; epistemic agents know what they are trying to accomplish and what their roles are in terms of achieving those goals, including roles around sensemaking and shaping sensemaking practices within the group (Stroupe et al., 2018). In engineering and design-based learning, the desired epistemic framing of goals involves designing solutions to problems. Additionally, engineering students may be expected to work collaboratively in groups, sharing responsibilities and equitably taking up positions of authority (Patterson, 2019). In this study, the group initially positioned Kai in an epistemic agentive role and Benny and Bernadine positioned themselves in more technical roles as constructors and recorders, although Kai downplayed this positioning and the group was observed sharing or distributing epistemic agency. These students emphasized that they organically took up these roles based on their abilities and the group’s needs. Later, during the final SDC, Jeremy was positioned as an authority, while Kai struggled to maintain her role as an authority and collaborator. The epistemic framing shifted during the final SDC as well, with Kai and Bernadine in particular losing sight of the goal of the SDCs; they no longer sought to design the best solution for their ‘client,’ but instead sought to finish their design “so we don’t have to go through this again” (from Stage 6 transcript). Their roles became less epistemically focused on finding an effective solution and more procedural, focusing on completing a school task.

The group identified problem solving as the epistemic goal of the SDCs and framed knowledge construction as a general epistemic goal in Mr. Martin’s class. As Lacey described during the focus group interview, “You’re given a list of constraints and criteria, and … you’re trying to design something that a ‘client’ has requested”. In this case, Mr. Martin acted as the hypothetical client who was requesting design prototypes for a particular need (i.e., storing and insulating vaccines without electricity and reducing injury from vehicle collisions). These students generally felt that the teacher emphasized learning as a goal in his class, saying that Mr. Martin “just tries his hardest to make sure that we learn what he’s trying to teach us” (Lacey) and “He wants us to pass [the state standardized test] so he makes sure that we know everything” (Bernadine). Students described the goal of their groupwork, or epistemic framing, in terms of knowledge-building and designing solutions, suggesting that they understood their roles to be important for sensemaking (Berland & Reiser, 2011; Cunningham & Kelly, 2017; Odden & Russ, 2019) and that they acted in these roles as epistemic agents, meaning that they shaped the epistemic practices of their group (Stroupe et al., 2018).

When the group was asked to describe their specific roles, they spoke to a division of labor they naturally “fell into”. This mostly reflects the positional framing of their activity in technical roles. Sometimes, this was based on a student’s strengths or weaknesses. As Lacey noted, “I did not trust myself with the hot glue because the first project we did, I severely burned myself … [so] I made quite a few designs and helped with the building that did not involve glue. I usually got the supplies and stuff”. Benny and Bernadine both worked on the actual building of the prototypes, with Bernadine noting, “I just kind of did most of the hot glue because I like hot glue”. Benny additionally worked in the packet, which was given to students to provide information such as client needs and structure for planning and recording tests and arguments. Kai was less certain of her role: “I just remember panicking a lot. I didn’t know what to do because it was like, we’re already over budget”. However, Lacey explicitly positioned Kai as the leader, and Bernadine attributed science knowledge authority to Kai:

Interviewer: Lacey called you a leader?

Lacey: Yeah, you were kind of more of the-

Kai: I just-

Bernadine: You were really good at the science part of it.

Lacey: You’re more organized, I think, even though you were panicking.

Kai: I just did what needed to be done in the packet.

From these self-reflections of roles and positions, Lacey and Bernadine thought that Kai held a position of some power or authority, leading and organizing the group, but Kai thought of her own actions as less influential and based more on the group’s needs, just “doing what needed to be done”. Kai seemed to undervalue her position, despite having a hand in most if not all aspects of the design process. This is explored more in the next section. From the observations of student discourse, Kai did take on a position of authority and agency, developing many solutions and advocating for her ideas. For example, Kai shared her two vaccine storage design concepts early in Stage 3 of the first SDC:

Turn	Talk
3	Kai: So, who’s going first?
4	Lacey: I volunteer you as tribute.
5	Kai: Dang it. Yeah, that’s cool. Okay. I’m a messy writer so it looks like a lump of dust. But, I wanted to get the box and we’d buy two boxes so we could use one as insulation because everything else is expensive. We’d buy one freezer bag, put it at the bottom. We’d take a bunch of batting and put a couple layers and then, yeah, basically…
6	Lacey: Can I see?
7	Kai: It would be a box, we’d put another box in the box with a bunch of batting on the outside.
8	Benny: What are the names of them?
9	Kai: I just put Concept 1 and Concept 2. The cost is exactly $15.
10	Lacey: And what’s the second one?
11	Kai: Here, let me see. Basically instead of building two boxes, we buy one box. We cut it up, make a mini box, and then we put three layers of the cardboard and three layers of the batting and then we put-
12	Lacey: Is the batting on the inside or the outside?
13	Kai: The inside.
14	Lacey: Okay.
15	Kai: And then we cover that portion of the three and then three layers of batting another piece of cardboard with a freezer bag at the bottom and the vaccine on the inside with kind of like a insulatable, but like clip it so that it won’t break. Keep it in place. It would be two splits on the side and make a club or handle.
16	Lacey: Nice.
17	Kai: And get a sill seal and then put it on the edge so that the heat doesn’t leak out.

In this example, we see Kai and Lacey negotiating the first sharer. As Kai shared her design concept, we also see how she connected the materials to the goals of being able to transport the vaccine using a club or handle and to reduce heat transfer (into the box, though she misspoke). Kai also kept the group on task, adding credence to Lacey’s description of Kai as a leader. This type of collaborative exchange was typical during the first SDC, as Lacey reflected on in the interview: “I feel like a lot of our ideas were super similar … kind of an amalgamation of all of us”. Previous studies show the importance of collaboration in argumentation as students negotiate epistemic authority and agency (Chen, 2020; Engle et al., 2014; González-Howard & McNeill, 2020; Ha & Kim, 2021). Negotiations of epistemic authority, or who is positioned as a capable knowledge producer (Engle et al., 2014), were seen when Lacey described herself as making “quite a few designs” in the interview and the group positioned Kai as a “leader” and epistemic authority for science knowledge during the first SDC.

However, there was a marked change during the final SDC, when Jeremy joined the group, replacing Lacey. Although Jeremy was not interviewed and as such could not speak for himself, the original group noted that he disrupted their positioning around shared or flexible roles. As Bernadine reflected, “I feel like he did most of the work, like he pushed us away and did most of the work”. The other group members described the way Jeremy took over the group and pushed forward his design concept without discussion and did not contribute to the work of completing the packet. During the focus group interview, Bernadine and Benny shared the following about Jeremy’s decision to use his design concept despite there being disagreement on the groups’ ranking matrices, where the lowest score represents the best design concept across multiple criteria:

Bernadine: [Jeremy’s concept] was the highest [score] on mine [ranking matrix] and it was the lowest on his … and he was like, ‘Okay we’re doing my idea!’ Because-

Benny: Yeah, without any say. …

Bernadine: He was like, ‘Oh we’re doing my idea,’ and then he was talking, and talking, and talking, and he wouldn’t write anything down and I was writing stuff down and I was trying to give him my ideas and he wouldn’t listen. And then when he wrote nothing down, he was trying to copy off my work.

While the group had previously worked collaboratively, sharing ideas and each contributing to the design process, most of the dialog and idea generation observed during the final SDC was dominated by Jeremy and Kai, which polarized the group and hindered their design work. At the same time, Jeremy refused to write in his packet as the discussion moved forward, instead relying on Bernadine to record his ideas and copying from her work later, positioning her in a technician role.

In another example, we see Jeremy and Kai competing to share their design concepts with the rest of the group. On the second day of Stage 3, Mr. Martin began class by reminding students about the criteria and constraints of the design challenge and how to use the criteria and constraints to rank and select a concept. Kai returned to describing her design concept, but Jeremy and Benny held a simultaneous conversation about Jeremy’s design concept:

Turn	Talk
101	Kai: Can we just get two popsicle sticks?
102	Bernadine: Kai, thank you for explaining yours, ‘cause I didn’t- [crosstalk]
103	Kai: Just take popsicles and glue them on the side. Call it a day.
104	Bernadine: I was thinking of putting like… Mine wouldn’t work, so I was thinking instead of just doing popsicle sticks, putting foam, too. [crosstalk]
105	Jeremy: Okay. Mine is $6.75.
106	Kai: Oh, I haven’t finished-
107	Bernadine: Yeah, Kai hasn’t finished.
108	Kai: -from like yesterday. Okay. So. it’s like-
109	Jeremy: Actually, $6.25 would have to [crosstalk]-
110	Kai: -the same design for both of them.
111	Jeremy: -because [inaudible]
112	Kai: Basically, you either use a jug or popsicle sticks. Because, like- I just made a thing of rice, sand, and foam in the middle, so it’d compress.
113	Jeremy: $6.25.

In this example, Jeremy took up a position as an epistemic authority but did not allow others to share in this role. Kai attempted to continue maintaining her own epistemic authority to share her concept, but this episode was not productive with both students talking over one another. Neither allowed the other to take up the position of sharer in this moment. Similar polarized dynamics were observed by Shim and Kim (2018) and González-Howard and McNeill (2020), although neither of these studies explicitly examined gender as a factor; the influence of gendered power dynamics will be discussed in the next section.

Along with this disruption of positional framing, we also observed a substantial shift in the nature of the epistemic framing of the task in the final SDC compared to the first. For example, near the end of Stage 3, Kai suggested that they combine her concept with Jeremy’s concept before building it, similar to what the group had done during the first SDC.

Turn	Talk
521	Kai: Before we start, we might want to consider refining the design. I wasn’t completely sure about how technical the-
522	Jeremy: Well, the thing is we’re supposed to refine the design after our-
523	Kai: Yes, but before we build it, we should probably make sure that it’s the best.
524	Bernadine: But if we make it work the first time, then we won’t have to do it again.
525	Kai: We’d have to do better than- [crosstalk]
526	Jeremy: Well, the thing is we still need to find out all the problems and then just-
527	Kai: Can we just-
528	Jeremy: Who knows, Styrofoam might cause a problem itself. You don’t know that.
529	Kai: What Styrofoam? There’s nothing in the cost…
530	Jeremy: Well, you said something about using the Styrofoam cup instead of a plastic bottle.
531	Kai: What? No, I wasn’t saying that. Just say put it to the design because all we have is a bottle. So-
532	Jeremy: We’ll add the stuff after to refine the design.
533	Kai: But then we won’t have to if we do it right the first time.
534	Jeremy: Well, the thing is, that we already agreed upon this idea. I don’t think we should refine it, and we should find all the problems-
535	Kai: I’m just concerned that it’s not going to work.

Kai’s suggestion was critiqued by Jeremy, who advocated for using his design as it was, and adding that “we’ll add the stuff after [we test it] to refine the design,” representing a more methodological approach. This disagreement about altering the design occupied much of the discussion throughout this SDC and reflects a significant difference in the epistemic framing between Jeremy’s strict methodological approach and the rest of the groups’ creative, generative approach that allowed for adjustments to and combinations of design concepts prior to building. Mr. Martin supported Jeremy’s framing, most clearly observed when he told the group “What you’ll do is decide which one you’re building. Build it then I’ll let you make modifications to it. The first one you design, you test it. The way it is, no modifications” (turn 411). Notably, the ADE framework is intended to encourage peer feedback and critique followed by adjustments to design concepts in Stage 4; this stage was skipped by Mr. Martin in the final SDC due to time constraints.

The group never did revise Jeremy’s initial idea, even after building and testing. Conflict within the group resulted in first Kai and then Bernadine disengaging from the design goals. When discussing the size of a highway crash barrier design concept, Kai states that “To be completely honest, let’s just build it, I don’t—As long as it’s not overly giant…” (turn 221). As the group attempted to decide on a concept to move forward with, they realized that they had a tie between several design concepts across all criteria. The group appealed to Jeremy to rank the concepts again, without focusing on accuracy:

Turn	Talk
271	Kai: Just rank it Jeremy.
272	Bernadine: Just rank it.
273	Kai: One through four.
274	Bernadine: Doesn’t have to be scientifically perfect.
275	Benny: Just assume.
276	Kai: Just rank it. It’s not going to be accurate either way.
277	Jeremy: Okay. I agree mine would be two.
278	Kai: We don’t have all the measurements. Mr. Martin?
279	Mr. Martin: Did you pick somebody [to collect data on their Chromebook]? Are they logged on?
280	Benny: Don’t do same numbers.
281	Kai: Is this the last one of these we’re going to do this year? Okay. Thanks.
282	Jeremy: So whoever I give number one would be the one we use, obviously.
283-285	[off-topic talk]
286	Jeremy: Just to be sure I’m accurate. This one based on…
287	Kai: Jeremy, which one do you think will work?
288	Bernadine: Yeah, it’s not that hard. You don’t have to determine each one. You don’t have to go, hm-mm-hmm [affirmative]. Hm-mm-hmm [affirmative]. Hm-mm-hmm [affirmative]. Just go-
289	Kai: Which one do you think will work?
290	Bernadine: Done.
291	Kai: And rank.

Here, we see Kai, Bernadine, and Benny encouraging Jeremy to just rank the concepts based not on “scientifically perfect” or “accurate” criteria (turns 274-276), but based on which he assumes “will work” (turn 287). When Jeremy declares his own concept “Sand Bottle” to be the decision, Kai clarifies, “Okay, so we can do Sand Bottle?” (turn 312) to which Bernadine responds, “I don’t care” (turn 313). This reflects a shift in the epistemic framing of the purpose of the SDC as well as a shift in authority to Jeremy to make decisions, regardless of performance metrics or collaboration between group members.

With the change in group composition, we observed how polarized power dynamics, specifically masculine hegemony (Due, 2014), interfered with the uptake of epistemic agency by reducing equitable participation in the group during the last SDC and changing the epistemic framing of the purpose of the SDC. Notably, Benny, the consistent boy in the group throughout the SDCs, did not leverage masculine hegemony or power over the rest of the group. He typically played a muted role, approving of or adding to others’ ideas without competition or polarization and contributing to the building of the prototype in later stages. Benny offers an example of what Due (2014) refers to as a “supporting and conflict-avoiding boy” (p. 450).

6.2. How Do Interactions Between Group Members and Their Reflections Reveal Gendered Power Dynamics?

Gender influences the ways in which students interact with one another (Due, 2014) and how students position themselves through empowered or disempowered positions (Carr, 2003). In this study, we observed dramatic, negative shifts in how the group resolved problems or disagreements and the ways that the girls in the group talked about their own knowledge and abilities over time. This is likely the result of the group composition changing, which disrupted the interactions and dynamics the group had established through previous SDCs. Jeremy’s presence in the group, and his different ideas about how the task should be completed, caused conflict within the group. Simultaneously, Kai and Bernadine changed how they talk about their own capabilities, disparaging themselves rather than building one another up. Specifically, we observed differences in the ways that the group resolved problems or disagreements and the ways that the girls in the group talked about their own knowledge and abilities.

During the first SDC, when Lacey noticed a problem with Benny’s design concept called “Batman,” the group worked together to brainstorm a solution:

Turn	Talk
81	Lacey: Okay so what’s the Batman?
82	Benny: Cardboard box but cut it down to as big as the 8 oz. water bottle and then put a freezer bag inside the water bottle and then sill seal at the top.
83	Lacey: So is that a box or a bag? Sorry.
84	Benny: Box.
85	Lacey: Okay.
86	Benny: Insulation on the top also.
87	Kai: Can I see?
88	Lacey: How much is it?
89	Benny: $13.75.
90	Lacey: $13.75. Well here’s the thing, I saw how big the ice pack was and it might not fit in the water bottle.
91	Kai: We could maybe just wrap it on the outside.
92	Benny: You could put it like- [mimes wrapping an ice pack around a water bottle]
93	Lacey: And then put the vaccine in the water bottle?
94	Benny: Yeah.
95	Kai: I think that’s a good idea. I like this one.

Lacey realized in turn 90 that the ice packs available to them would not fit inside a plastic water bottle, as Benny had originally planned (turn 82). Kai’s suggestion in turn 91 was accepted by Benny and Lacey. Additionally, in this event, we see Kai praising Benny’s concept as a “good idea”.

This contrasts with an event seen during the last SDC. Jeremy’s highway crash barrier design concept involved a plastic water bottle filled with sand. Kai had noted earlier that the compression test result data they had access to showed that Styrofoam “tested really well” with a compression ratio of 3.59 (compression distance to mass). She was concerned that the plastic water bottle would compress too much without absorbing enough force.

Turn	Talk
444	Kai: We need to compress…
445	Jeremy: We can cut a different portion of the bottle if we need to.
446	Kai: Yes, but like, my problem is plastic is really easy to compress. It’s not going to take that much impact.
447	Jeremy: I see where you’re coming from. But it’s also fairly cheap for what we’re doing.
448	Kai: It is cheap but will it work? ‘Cause Styrofoam-
449	Bernadine: Yours cost like $6, we still, like… it doesn’t-
450	Kai: Styrofoam is also cheap and it compresses more.
451	Bernadine: Yeah. Styrofoam would work better. We probably wouldn’t have to build it again if it worked the first time.
452	Jeremy: So let’s try the plastic the first time and then we’ll try the Styrofoam to see if that does better.
453	Kai: I was- So… it’s just the bottle and then sand.
454	Jeremy: Bottle, sand, popsicle sticks and then foam on the bottom.

In this instance, when Kai brought up a potential issue with the materials in Jeremy’s design concept, Jeremy first defended the plastic as cheap (turn 447), which Kai and Bernadine disputed in turns 448–451, with Styrofoam also being cheap and more effective. Then, Jeremy appealed to a methodical approach, citing that they can change the material after testing (turn 452). The group continued to unproductively dispute various aspects of Jeremy’s Sand Bottle concept for the remainder of the class period and into the next day they worked on the SDC. As described in the previous section, Kai and Bernadine gave up their efforts and eventually disengaged from the design process.

We also observed a change in the ways the girls’ talked about themselves and one another. During the first SDC, there were several instances of empowering talk and praise. For example, in turn 95, Kai praises Benny’s Batman concept, saying “I think that’s a good idea. I like this one”. Soon after, Bernadine describes her design concept; Kai similarly tells her “That’s genius. How big is it? Did you cut up the box just regular?” (turn 98). Likewise, Bernadine agrees with the groups’ shared idea to insert the vaccine Falcon tube into the water bottle in place of the screw-on cap, saying “That’s smart. That’s smart” (turn 177). These are examples of praising and empowering language (Carr, 2003) used during the first SDC, as Kai and Bernadine complimented one anothers’ design concepts and ideas as “smart” and “genius”. Importantly, a distribution of power was performed in part through this intentional encouragement by peers to share their ideas and thoughts, similar to what Bennett et al. (2010) and Ha and Kim (2021) found.

However, this changed during the final SDC. Rather than empowering each other and complimenting one another’s ideas, Kai and Bernadine shifted to using disempowered language (Carr, 2003), especially when referring to themselves. For example, when calculating the weight of her highway crash barrier concept, Kai struggled, commenting “I got, um… I can’t do math” (turn 121). Bernadine responded, “Yesterday I didn’t know two plus two” (turn 121). Later, still trying to estimate the total weight of her design concept, Kai again disparages her own abilities:

Turn	Talk
155	Bernadine: How many grams of rice-
156	Kai: I’d say, like 15.
157	Bernadine: 15 g?
158	Kai: I don’t know. I can’t make this.
159	Jeremy: Did you use any sand or rice?
160	Kai: I used rice.
161	Jeremy: Okay, that’s 100 g.
162	Kai: Then like, 150.
163	Jeremy: 150.
164	Kai: I’m not good at weight.
165	Jeremy: Let me see. [Kai hands her packet to Jeremy] Let’s see here. Okay, so, popsicle sticks. That’s…
166	Kai: Don’t pay attention to the thing at the bottom.
167	Jeremy: M’kay. If I had to estimate, 150 g.
168	Kai: Okay.

Bernadine and Jeremy prompt Kai to calculating a reasonable weight estimate for her concept, but Kai continues to second-guess herself, saying she cannot do it (turn 158) or that she is not good at it (turn 164). When Jeremy comes to the same weight estimate (turn 167) that she herself stated earlier (turn 162), Kai simply accepts his answer, saying “Okay” (turn 168).

Later, we again see Kai and Bernadine referencing disempowering language, as they estimate the size of their design concepts and became confused about area and volume:

Turn	Talk
204	Kai: Not perfectly to scale but I just… That is I believe eight centimeters, nine centimeters, in length. … So I’m just going to say it’s about nine. With all the foam and the thing on the tip, that’s three for the width. Hold on, let me-
205	Jeremy: Nine for width, what’s the height?
206	Kai: Okay, like 162 cm cubed.
207	Bernadine: It’s squared not cubed.
208	Kai: I thought it was supposed to be cubed.
209	Bernadine: No. It’s squared.
210	Kai: But his thing [the teacher’s instructions on the whiteboard] says cubed.
211	Bernadine: I think you said cubed. That confused him, hold on. [looking through packet]
212	Jeremy: Cubed is-
213	Bernadine: I don’t know what cubed means.
214	Jeremy: -width, length, and height.
215	Bernadine: Am I supposed to know what cubed means? Because I don’t know.
216	Kai: It’s supposed to be cubed right? So I multiplied width, length, and height.
217	Bernadine: I just put 129 cm squared.
218	Kai: Then why’d he write cubed? Okay, it’s like, 52 cm squared.
219	Jeremy: So yours is around 52 cm squared?
220	Bernadine: I have no idea what mine is.

Kai thought that the “size” measurement they should use was the three-dimensional cubic size of the entire highway crash barrier, rather than the footprint area where the barrier would fit onto the test track. Despite “cubed” being written on the whiteboard, she accepts Jeremy and Bernadine’s claim that the correct size metric should be squared. Further, in turns 213 and 215, Bernadine claims she does not know what cubed means. In contrast, the only empowering language observed in Stage 3 of the final SDC came from Jeremy, when he was referring to his SDC 1 vaccine storage design in his previous group. He stated “I mean, my table was literally just trying to change all of my design when they came down to my design, for every- and I was pretty good in most stats” (turn 334).

These disempowered comments from Kai and Bernadine reflect a broader pattern throughout the final SDC, which sharply contrasts to the first SDC, where these girls often referred to their own abilities using empowering language. Some context for this shift may be seen in the interview, where Bernadine reflected that she does not always speak up out of fear of being described as bossy: “when I was little I used to be really bossy so I try not to be as bossy so I don’t talk as much”. Her disempowered talk about her own intelligence may be her way of stepping back from any authoritative positioning. Similarly, Kai minimized her role in the SDCs, saying that she “just did what needed to be done in the packet”. This is very different from the leadership role she was observed to take up in the group.

Only in the final SDC, after the group composition changed, did we see instances of disempowered language (Carr, 2003) and a pattern of epistemic oppression (Dotson, 2014; Fricker, 1999; Pohlhaus, 2020); this served to diminish the contributions and positioning of the girls in the group (Kai and Bernadine). Additionally, Bernadine’s avoidance of taking up space to talk in order to avoid being perceived as “bossy” is emblematic of how girls uniquely experience the label of “bossy” as a microaggression (Clerkin et al., 2015). In understanding engineering to be a male-dominated field (e.g., Kinzie, 2007; Malicky, 2003; Morelock, 2017) wherein girls view themselves and are viewed by their peers as less competent or capable (e.g., Due, 2014; Master et al., 2017; Nazar et al., 2019), we attribute the polarized structure of Mr. Martin’s group during the final SDC and the positioning of Jeremy as empowered and his group—including his exclusion of his peers’ ideas as well as Bernadine’s hesitancy to seem “bossy”—as a function of masculine hegemony (Due, 2014). Jeremy’s competitive pushing for his ideas caused the whole group to lose meaning in their activity (Berland et al., 2016), and their epistemic agency subsequently suffered. Without group cohesion, these students changed their goal for the task from one of epistemic importance—designing a solution to a real-world problem—to one of “doing the lesson” (Jiménez-Aleixandre et al., 2000).

6.3. Summary of Findings

This study examines the student enactment of epistemic agency through an examination of negotiations of power and explicit use of feminist theory (Beddoes & Borrego, 2011; Due, 2014; Esmonde, 2016). A mixed-gendered middle school group framed the epistemic goals of the SDCs around designing solutions to real-world problems, though this focus was lost by the girls in the group during the final SDC. They negotiated and enacted collaborative and distributed positions of authority and epistemic agency during the first SDC, which was also diminished during the final SDC, in which authority was polarized and focused within Jeremy. This similarly resulted in changes in the ways that the girls, in particular, resolved disagreements and the language they used in regard to their knowledge and abilities. For girls in male-dominated fields such as engineering, a significant issue arises when their modes of participation differ from those of their male peers. Girls and women in engineering often experience negative stereotypes (Master et al., 2017; Riegle-Crumb & Morton, 2017), discrimination (Malicky, 2003), and microaggressions (Ingram, 2006; Stonyer, 2002; Wieselmann et al., 2020) and are less likely to pursue engineering as a career or major (Kinzie, 2007), despite having equal ability to their male peers (Malicky, 2003).

7. Implications and Limitations

These findings are limited in several ways which must be understood before discussing the implications of the research. First, observed power structures are considered in terms of gender and assume boys to be more empowered in the engineering context of the study; but other aspects of the participants’ identities, such as race, ethnicity, confidence, or self-efficacy, were not considered in the analysis. It is notable that Kai, self-identified as Asian/Pacific Islander, was the only non-white member of the group. How her racial and ethnic identity (or her intersectional identities as an Asian/Pacific Islander girl) influenced her participation was not examined.

Together, this work suggests that girls value and encourage collaboration when working in groups by creating space for peers to contribute. When all group members are given this space, they are in turn all able to take up epistemic agentive roles within that space, and the group is able to operate collectively. In other words, power is distributed within the group equitably, and this is typical in all- or majority-girl groups. In this study, within an equitable group context, all members had opportunities to participate, take up epistemic agentive roles, and enact epistemic agency. In order to support and embrace girls and women in male-dominated STEM fields, particularly engineering, we argue for the importance of research examining power dynamics, masculinity, and feminism with the goal of empowering all students to take up agentive roles and engage meaningfully in their work. As such, there are several directions for further work.

Although majority-female grouping often results in more collaborative participation (Bennett et al., 2010; Schnittka & Schnittka, 2016; Shah et al., 2020), as was seen in Mr. Martin’s group during the first SDC, this strategy cannot be relied upon in practice, where there may not be a large number of female students or students are assigned to heterogeneous groups. In addition, this type of grouping does not address the underlying issue of masculine hegemony, nor does it consider the ways in which girls and women can be an asset to their male peers—and vice versa. Our findings suggest that mixed-gender grouping can lead to equitable collaboration and should be fostered, not avoided. When girls are positioned with power and authority, as Kai was, for example, they may redistribute this power to other group members and encourage shared epistemic agency (see also Bennett et al., 2010).

This raises questions, however, about how teachers can support students, especially girls, in taking on leadership roles and encouraging equitable participation within all groups. What actions can teachers take to foster a collaborative classroom? Several suggestions for equitable groupwork have been suggested, such as emphasizing the value of collaboration and intentional work toward equitable groupwork (Patterson, 2019), teacher scaffolding and distribution of roles (Schenkel & Calabrese Barton, 2020), and encouraging virtuous listening, meaning listening to students’ and peers’ needs and requests (Stroupe, 2023). In addition, how does the teacher’s framing of engineering problems and design work influence student participation and epistemic agency? For example, in this study, we saw that Kai’s epistemic framing of the SDC involved a more creative and generative approach compared to Jeremy’s teacher-supported, stepwise, methodological approach. Engineering scholars (e.g., Dym et al., 2005) and engineering education scholars (e.g., Baze et al., 2023; Lucas & Hanson, 2016; Pleasants & Olson, 2019) emphasize the complex nature of engineering design thinking and validate creative approaches like Kai’s, which can lead to better innovation, collaboration, and product development. If engineering is presented only as a coldly rational, competitive, and masculine discipline, does that influence the ways that girls participate and take ownership of the work? Additionally, how, if at all, do teachers’ own identities (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, etc.) affect their students’ uptake of power and agency? And how does a teacher’s engineering experience—or lack thereof—contribute to the epistemic framing of DBL tasks?

Implications for research also revolve around several important questions. What could it mean to foster a classroom community grounded in equitable sensemaking, where students see themselves and their peers as epistemic agents and position one another as such, especially considering the multiple powered dynamics at play within a classroom? How can this be achieved? What might be required from the teacher, the curriculum, and our perceptions of engineering as a discipline? Baze and González-Howard (2025) begin to explore some of these questions. The current study represents an early examination into student epistemic and positional framing in a DBL context and through the SEP of argumentation. DBL is a necessary and generative starting block for this work as it already places the students in the driver’s seat for how to engage with the discipline, practices, and each other. More work is needed to develop a holistic understanding of structures for student participation to support the equitable student enactment of epistemic agency and how this leads to innovation and knowledge creation in DBL contexts.