Around the world, females typically represent fifteen per cent or less of registered professional engineers. They also leave the profession at significantly higher rates than their male counterparts. Incidences of sexual harassment and sexual discrimination continue to be reported in interviews with female graduate engineers. Despite many years of study and initiatives to get more females into engineering, girls and women continue to avoid this profession. Research into the workplace experiences of female engineers tends to neglect organizational and institutional contexts. In particular, there is a lack of attention paid to the ways in which engineering associations, as regulatory bodies in the profession, support their female members. To that end, Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and concept of hegemony were used to open new empirical terrain by providing an account of the sexual harassment and sexual discrimination discourse of the Ontario professional engineering association. It was found that the discourse of sexual harassment and sexual discrimination is hegemonized by the discourses of regulation and the practice of engineering. Critical gender equality issues that academic research has reported for female practitioners inside engineering workplaces, such as sexual harassment and sexual discrimination, are considered outside of the practices of regulation and engineering. Gender work within the association is confined to supporting the female members of the profession and is performed by the female members of the association. This contributes to the maintenance of the status quo, the illusion of gender neutrality, and the privileging of one gender over another in this local setting of the profession. It is recommended that engineering associations examine the effects of hegemonized spaces created by their practices of regulation and professional engineering discourse, particularly in the area of the workplace conditions of its members. It is also recommended that the scope and range of gender equity change actions practiced by engineering associations go beyond mainly providing modes of support for females in the profession. / 2013-03

This dissertation aims to integrate various learning approaches, i.e., multiple literacies, experiential learning, game-enhanced learning, and global simulation, into an extracurricular module, in which it remodels traditional ways of teaching input, specifically, the lexical- and grammatical-only approaches of business English at a private university in Bangkok, Thailand. Informed by those approaches, a game-enhanced simulation was specifically designed as an experiential space for L2 learners to experience the dynamic and real business contexts of language use. A strategy-simulation video game, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 Platinum (RCT3), was selected and used in the implementation of the pilot course. The game was embedded in a global simulation of two amusement park companies – where students worked in groups of five to form characters and socially interact with others. The global simulation involved learners in a sequence of genre-based (e.g., memoranda and business presentations) and technology-based tasks (e.g., using Gmail, Google Docs, and LinkedIn). Ten second-year students from five disciplines – Accounting, Logistics Engineering, Technology and Creative Business, Logistics Management, and Airline Business Management, participated in the study. Within this game-enhanced simulation, it turned out that each student simulated the role of a department head that was relevant to her or his discipline, for example, department heads of Financial Management, Technical Service Management, Customer Relationship Management, Legal and Operations Management, and Human Capital Management. The findings show that the learners' interactivity within the gameplay depicted the pedagogical affordances of RCT3 for a business English simulation, that is, exploratory interactivity, goal-orientedness in gameplay, goal-orientedness for roleplaying, and emergent narratives. The data present how this videogame features an interplay between two game perspectives – ludology and narratology. That is, ludic affordances in RCT3 could be activated in a narrative system: meaningful personal or emergent narrative by well-designed global simulation tasks. The simulations were established through students’ interpretation and creativity in gameplay and roleplay as related to their disciplines. Moreover, the game-enhanced simulation appeared to provide learners with an effective social context for promoting global English development and professional identity formation, which moved them beyond the learning practices of traditional coursebooks and classroom settings. Students of the study had opportunities to use professional Discourses related to their disciplines as ways to establish their desired identities within the simulated global workplace.