#ECIL2023. Approaches to exploring the information worlds of women engineering students

Pam McKinney here live blogging the 3rd day of the ECIL conference [posted later due to wifi issues], this session is the doctoral forum, and Laura Woods, who is studying for a PhD with Sheila Webber and me, is presenting the beginning stages of her PhD research into the information words of women engineering students.
Laura began by stating that she is early in her PhD journey and will present today by exploring the theoretical approaches underpinning her research. The aim of Laura’s PhD is to explore the information experiences within the lifeworlds of female engineering students, taking a phenomenological approach in an interview based study. Women’s ways of knowing (WWK) is a model developed by educational psychologists to understand women’s experiences of learning in higher education. It is an extension of an earlier scheme of intellectual development of college students in the 1950s, that was probably developed from participants of quite a narrow sociological background. The women’s perspective in this research may have been quite limited. The WWK study recruited participants from a broad range of backgrounds, and outlined 5 ways of knowing.
The first way is “silence”, and these women did not see themselves as capable of creating knowledge. The second way, “received” where knowledge is a passive process, received from experts in the discipline. They see knowledge in a binary right or wrong way. The 3rd way is “subjective knowledge “ where education is seen as an artificial process, it is personal, private and intuitive. The 4th way is “procedural” where women learn new strategies for knowing. The 5th stage is “constructed” where knowledge is seen as constructed and contextual, where many different strategies are adopted. This model is not intended to be seen as a linear model, and people can more fluidly between stages.
Critiques of the model have focused on the perceived hierarchy of the model, and reflects the masculine bias in epistemological models. The next criticism focuses on gender essentialism, and assumes a common experience to all women. However other research has shown that these are not exclusive to women. The final criticism is that it ignores considerations of race, and centres whiteness. This is fairly common for feminist research at the time.
WWK has been used in LIS research, and has potential considering the role of women. Laura has found around 20 pieces of research, but often it is only mentioned in passing. 4 articles have adopted the model in a more significant way: for example, Anna Fields compared the WWK with the ACRL competency standards for information literacy. In 2003 Annemaree Lloyd described information literacy as a “way of knowing”. In 2007 Hope Olsen uses connected knowing to propose a connected knowledge organisation scheme.
Intersectional feminism is another model that Laura is drawing on. This model proposes that people experience marginalisation across a range of protected characteristics, and recognises the varying life experiences of women. This model has also been used in LIS, but is under-used as an approach. Research into women’s information behaviour has focused on the differences between men and women, there is a limited literature that takes an intersectional approach.Laura hopes to use these approaches in her research.
Laura hopes to use WWK as a sensitising concept in the analysis phase, to investigate the role of affect e.g. the role of uncertainty in information the search process. The role of authority and expertise, e.g. how a subjective knower understands authority. Laura intends to combine WWK with a intersectional approach and not take a binary view of gender, and to take a purposive sampling approach to recruit participants with a variety of characteristics.
There was a lively discussion of Laura’s plans for her PhD research, and lots of interest in the approaches outlined bin the presentation. Sheila and I are excited to see the research unfold. The abstract for this talk is on this page.