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1. Building a Leadership Toolkit: Underrepresented Students' Development of Leadership-Enabling Competencies through a Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) in Engineering Education

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--43054  

   Volpe, Elizabeth ; Simmons, Denise ; Rojas, Sara ( June 2023 , ASEE Conferences)

   The development of inclusive leaders is essential for the success of future engineering and our nation. Equipping students with vital leadership-enabling competencies is necessary to develop a workforce that is prepared to act ethically, and responsibly, and tackle unforeseen challenges in the future. Inclusive leaders, or leaders that are self-aware, empathetic, and prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion in their decision-making, are essential for the forward progress of engineering. A growing body of literature highlights the numerous ways in which students may develop leadership skills outside of the classroom through involvement in out-of-class activities (e.g., internships, clubs, sports, and research experiences). Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs) may provide students with a unique opportunity to develop leadership-enabling competencies that will prepare them for leadership in graduate school, the engineering industry, or academia. The goal of this research was to identify how students’ engagement in an engineering education virtual REU site contributed to their development of essential leadership-enabling competencies. The research question guiding this study was ‘What inclusive leadership-enabling competencies and skills did engineering students learn and develop during an engineering education Summer REU program?’ Qualitative data was collected via weekly open-ended surveys from 9 students (7 women, 2 men) participating in an REU over 9 weeks. Participants in this study consisted of students from underrepresented groups in engineering (e.g., Black, Latinx, women, students from low SES backgrounds, or first-generation students), attending large public research universities across the United States. This study implemented mixed methods to understand what leadership competencies were occurring most frequently and how students were learning and developing these competencies. A combination of text mining for frequency (quantitative analysis) and deductive and inductive coding (qualitative analysis) was used to analyze the data. A codebook was developed based on the leadership-coupled professional competencies that engineering industry leaders identified as essential for engineers entering the workforce. Researchers also allowed for other competencies and leadership-enabling skills to emerge from the data. Findings from this work indicate that students were developing a vast amount of inclusive leadership knowledge and skills from participating in the virtual REU site. This paper highlights, through the use of word clouds and text mining software, the many leadership-enabling competencies that participants developed throughout the summer research experience (e.g., learning, communication, adaptability, self-awareness, balance, networking, etc.). Further, students were able to develop digital literacy, increased communication skills, knowledge of career pathways, intrapersonal growth, and interpersonal relations. This work offers a novel contribution to the literature in understanding how students can develop technical engineering and research skills as well as professional and leadership skills in the same space. Findings from this work help to illuminate the benefits of this virtual REU site focused on engineering education research resulting in terms of developing inclusive leadership skills. Implications for future REU programs, students interested in developing leadership skills, engineering graduate programs, academia, and industry employers are outlined. 

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2. COVID-19 and Housing Security in Remote Alaska Native Communities

   Nicewonger, Todd E. ; McNair, Lisa D. ; Fritz, Stacey ; Supple, Laura ; Criss-Carboy, Laura ( November 2023 , Virginia Tech Publishing)

   Nicewonger, Todd E. ; McNair, Lisa D. ; Fritz, Stacey (Ed.)

   https://pressbooks.lib.vt.edu/alaskanative/ At the start of the pandemic, the editors of this annotated bibliography initiated a remote (i.e., largely virtual) ethnographic research project that investigated how COVID-19 was impacting off-site modular construction practices in Alaska Native communities. Many of these communities are located off the road system and thus face not only dramatically higher costs but multiple logistical challenges in securing licensed tradesmen and construction crews and in shipping building supplies and equipment to their communities. These barriers, as well as the region’s long winters and short building seasons, complicate the construction of homes and related infrastructure projects. Historically, these communities have also grappled with inadequate housing, including severe overcrowding and poor-quality building stock that is rarely designed for northern Alaska’s climate (Marino 2015). Moreover, state and federal bureaucracies and their associated funding opportunities often further complicate home building by failing to accommodate the digital divide in rural Alaska and the cultural values and practices of Native communities.[1] It is not surprising, then, that as we were conducting fieldwork for this project, we began hearing stories about these issues and about how the restrictions caused by the pandemic were further exacerbating them. Amidst these stories, we learned about how modular home construction was being imagined as a possible means for addressing both the complications caused by the pandemic and the need for housing in the region (McKinstry 2021). As a result, we began to investigate how modular construction practices were figuring into emergent responses to housing needs in Alaska communities. We soon realized that we needed to broaden our focus to capture a variety of prefabricated building methods that are often colloquially or idiomatically referred to as “modular.” This included a range of prefabricated building systems (e.g., manufactured, volumetric modular, system-built, and Quonset huts and other reused military buildings[2]). Our further questions about prefabricated housing in the region became the basis for this annotated bibliography. Thus, while this bibliography is one of multiple methods used to investigate these issues, it played a significant role in guiding our research and helped us bring together the diverse perspectives we were hearing from our interviews with building experts in the region and the wider debates that were circulating in the media and, to a lesser degree, in academia. The actual research for each of three sections was carried out by graduate students Lauren Criss-Carboy and Laura Supple.[3] They worked with us to identify source materials and their hard work led to the team identifying three themes that cover intersecting topics related to housing security in Alaska during the pandemic. The source materials collected in these sections can be used in a variety of ways depending on what readers are interested in exploring, including insights into debates on housing security in the region as the pandemic was unfolding (2021-2022). The bibliography can also be used as a tool for thinking about the relational aspects of these themes or the diversity of ways in which information on housing was circulating during the pandemic (and the implications that may have had on community well-being and preparedness). That said, this bibliography is not a comprehensive analysis. Instead, by bringing these three sections together with one another to provide a snapshot of what was happening at that time, it provides a critical jumping off point for scholars working on these issues. The first section focuses on how modular housing figured into pandemic responses to housing needs. In exploring this issue, author Laura Supple attends to both state and national perspectives as part of a broader effort to situate Alaska issues with modular housing in relation to wider national trends. This led to the identification of multiple kinds of literature, ranging from published articles to publicly circulated memos, blog posts, and presentations. These materials are important source materials that will likely fade in the vastness of the Internet and thus may help provide researchers with specific insights into how off-site modular construction was used – and perhaps hyped – to address pandemic concerns over housing, which in turn may raise wider questions about how networks, institutions, and historical experiences with modular construction are organized and positioned to respond to major societal disruptions like the pandemic. As Supple pointed out, most of the material identified in this review speaks to national issues and only a scattering of examples was identified that reflect on the Alaskan context. The second section gathers a diverse set of communications exploring housing security and homelessness in the region. The lack of adequate, healthy housing in remote Alaska communities, often referred to as Alaska’s housing crisis, is well-documented and preceded the pandemic (Guy 2020). As the pandemic unfolded, journalists and other writers reported on the immense stress that was placed on already taxed housing resources in these communities (Smith 2020; Lerner 2021). The resulting picture led the editors to describe in their work how housing security in the region exists along a spectrum that includes poor quality housing as well as various forms of houselessness including, particularly relevant for the context, “hidden homelessness” (Hope 2020; Rogers 2020). The term houseless is a revised notion of homelessness because it captures a richer array of both permanent and temporary forms of housing precarity that people may experience in a region (Christensen et al. 2107). By identifying sources that reflect on the multiple forms of housing insecurity that people were facing, this section highlights the forms of disparity that complicated pandemic responses. Moreover, this section underscores ingenuity (Graham 2019; Smith 2020; Jason and Fashant 2021) that people on the ground used to address the needs of their communities. The third section provides a snapshot from the first year of the pandemic into how CARES Act funds were allocated to Native Alaska communities and used to address housing security. This subject was extremely complicated in Alaska due to the existence of for-profit Alaska Native Corporations and disputes over eligibility for the funds impacted disbursements nationwide. The resources in this section cover that dispute, impacts of the pandemic on housing security, and efforts to use the funds for housing as well as barriers Alaska communities faced trying to secure and use the funds. In summary, this annotated bibliography provides an overview of what was happening, in real time, during the pandemic around a specific topic: housing security in largely remote Alaska Native communities. The media used by housing specialists to communicate the issues discussed here are diverse, ranging from news reports to podcasts and from blogs to journal articles. This diversity speaks to the multiple ways in which information was circulating on housing at a time when the nightly news and radio broadcasts focused heavily on national and state health updates and policy developments. Finding these materials took time, and we share them here because they illustrate why attention to housing security issues is critical for addressing crises like the pandemic. For instance, one theme that emerged out of a recent National Science Foundation workshop on COVID research in the North NSF Conference[4] was that Indigenous communities are not only recovering from the pandemic but also evaluating lessons learned to better prepare for the next one, and resilience will depend significantly on more—and more adaptable—infrastructure and greater housing security. 

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3. Situating Engineering Education in a World Impacted by COVID-19

   De Pree, Thomas ; Appelhans, Sarah ; Cheville, Alan ; Akera, Atsushi ; Shuey, Melissa ( July 2021 , ASEE annual conference exposition)

   null (Ed.)

   In June 2020, at the annual conference of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), which was held entirely online due to the impacts of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2), engineering education researchers and social justice scholars diagnosed the spread of two diseases in the United States: COVID-19 and racism. During a virtual workshop (T614A) titled, “Using Power, Privilege, and Intersectionality as Lenses to Understand our Experiences and Begin to Disrupt and Dismantle Oppressive Structures Within Academia,” Drs. Nadia Kellam, Vanessa Svihla, Donna Riley, Alice Pawley, Kelly Cross, Susannah Davis, and Jay Pembridge presented what we might call a pathological analysis of institutionalized racism and various other “isms.” In order to address the intersecting impacts of this double pandemic, they prescribed counter practices and protocols of anti-racism, and strategies against other oppressive “isms” in academia. At the beginning of the virtual workshop, the presenters were pleasantly surprised to see that they had around a hundred attendees. Did the online format of the ASEE conference afford broader exposure of the workshop? Did recent uprising of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests across the country, and internationally, generate broader interest in their topic? Whatever the case, at a time when an in-person conference could not be convened without compromising public health safety, ASEE’s virtual conference platform, furnished by Pathable and supplemented by Zoom, made possible the broader social impacts of Dr. Svihla’s land acknowledgement of the unceded Indigenous lands from which she was presenting. Svihla attempted to go beyond a hollow gesture by including a hyperlink in her slides to a COVID-19 relief fund for the Navajo Nation, and encouraged attendees to make a donation as they copied and pasted the link in the Zoom Chat. Dr. Cross’s statement that you are either a racist or an anti-racist at this point also promised broader social impacts in the context of the virtual workshop. You could feel the intensity of the BLM social movements and the broader political climate in the tone of the presenters’ voices. The mobilizing masses on the streets resonated with a cutting-edge of social justice research and education at the ASEE virtual conference. COVID-19 has both exacerbated and made more obvious the unevenness and inequities in our educational practices, processes, and infrastructures. This paper is an extension of a broader collaborative research project that accounts for how an exceptional group of engineering educators have taken this opportunity to socially broaden their curricula to include not just public health matters, but also contemporary political and social movements. Engineering educators for change and advocates for social justice quickly recognized the affordances of diverse forms of digital technologies, and the possibilities of broadening their impact through educational practices and infrastructures of inclusion, openness, and accessibility. They are makers of what Gary Downy calls “scalable scholarship”—projects in support of marginalized epistemologies that can be scaled up from ideation to practice in ways that unsettle and displace the dominant epistemological paradigm of engineering education.[1] This paper is a work in progress. It marks the beginning of a much lengthier project that documents the key positionality of engineering educators for change, and how they are socially situated in places where they can connect social movements with industrial transitions, and participate in the production of “undone sciences” that address “a structured absence that emerges from relations of inequality.”[2] In this paper, we offer a brief glimpse into ethnographic data we collected virtually through interviews, participant observation, and digital archiving from March 2019 to August 2019, during the initial impacts of COVID-19 in the United States. The collaborative research that undergirds this paper is ongoing, and what is presented here is a rough and early articulation of ideas and research findings that have begun to emerge through our engagement with engineering educators for change. This paper begins by introducing an image concept that will guide our analysis of how, in this historical moment, forms of social and racial justice are finding their way into the practices of engineering educators through slight changes in pedagogical techniques in response the debilitating impacts of the pandemic. Conceptually, we are interested in how small and subtle changes in learning conditions can socially broaden the impact of engineering educators for change. After introducing the image concept that guides this work, we will briefly discuss methodology and offer background information about the project. Next, we discuss literature that revolves around the question, what is engineering education for? Finally, we introduce the notion of situating engineering education and give readers a brief glimpse into our ethnographic data. The conclusion will indicate future directions for writing, research, and intervention. 

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4. How engineers negotiate domain boundaries in a complex, interdisciplinary engineering project

   Panther, G. ; Montfort, D. ; Pirtle, Z. ( January 2017 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   This paper is a research paper. Many engineering problems require efficient coordination across disciplinary boundaries. Few studies exist about how engineers negotiate and coordinate the knowledge required for working across these boundaries on large, intricate engineering problems. We approach knowledge as a complex and socially constructed system. Knowledge systems are inherently difficult to study because they are dynamic and ephemeral: they are only visible in interactions among the individuals of the community. The purpose of this research is to gain a better understanding of the knowledge system of practicing engineers through ethnographic observations of their practices. We used an ethnography-inspired situative approach based on observable knowledge practices to study the knowledge system of practicing engineers. Data was collected through observation of a Critical Design Review (CDR) of a satellite project at NASA. A CDR occurs after the technical design and specifications of a project nears completion and brings together the scientists and engineers on a project to present their plans to an external review board. A CDR therefore provides a unique opportunity to witness how knowledge is exchanged and negotiated within a complex, interdisciplinary setting. The resulting ethnographic observations were analyzed and categorized into peak events. Peak events were identified when successive questions were asked pertaining to the engineering design. Focusing on these events is a useful lens to get insight about the overall knowledge system because they can represent moments where different understandings and disciplinary perspectives emerge. This paper reports on one such peak event concerning the thermal design of the satellite. We focus on one peak to provide sufficient detail so that the knowledge system and its context can be understood. Thermal design of a spacecraft is complex and dynamic with the engineer having to design for drastically different external thermal environments while balancing the changing thermal demands of internal systems. The thermal design discussion provides a particularly thorough example of a knowledge system since the engineer explained, justified, negotiated, and defended knowledge within a social setting. For example, a reviewer asked the engineer if they had taken into account what they considered to be the worst-case scenario. This required an extended discussion to negotiate the criteria by which the credibility and relevance of design components were assessed and to create a shared meaning of what “worst-case” meant. This discussion was centrally important to the technical success of the project and was unequivocally “engineering,” even though it was light on technical detail. This aspect of engineering work is focused more on the epistemic criteria by which knowledge is assessed (i.e. on the foundations of the knowledge system), rather than the technical knowledge of the design itself. Engineering students do not get much practice or instruction in explicitly negotiating knowledge systems and epistemic standards. Although this analysis is limited to a single discussion, we argue that such discussions are important in many engineering projects. Understanding how engineers communicate across different epistemic and disciplinary viewpoints is another step towards creating an engineering curriculum that more closely aligns with engineering practice. Furthermore, it shows that engineering knowledge is not only something to be possessed but instead something that must be negotiated within an interconnected and socially situated knowledge system. 

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5. Work in Progress: Novel Ethnographic Approaches for Investigating Engineering Practice

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--35672  

   Jesiek, Brent ; Johri, Aditya ; Brozina, Cory ; Korte, Russell ( June 2020 , 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   This work-in-progress paper reports on the early phases of an exploratory research project involving use of innovative approaches to collecting, analyzing, and archiving empirical data related to engineering practice. More specifically, our project takes an ethnographic approach to studying technical teams at multiple field sites representing multiple industry sectors using novel methods such as agile ethnography, trace ethnography, and network ethnography. In contrast to traditional ethnographic studies that may involve long periods of participant observation, these new approaches often involve less intensive fieldwork, and are instead designed around more targeted research questions and other sources of evidence (e.g., social network data, documentary traces in digital systems). These methods are new and evolving, and therefore have scarcely been used to study engineering practice. Thus, one major goal of the paper is to introduce the proposed methods to the engineering education research community. In doing so, we explore the potential for these methods to generate research findings more rapidly and with a greater focus on specific problems and questions of interest to both industry and researchers. Such methods have gained traction in workplace settings precisely due to such advantages, especially in software engineering and related fields where work is already very digital and distributed in character. A second major goal of this paper is to give a brief progress report on the early stages of our study, including the initial groundwork carried out to gain access to, and begin collecting data at, multiple field sites. We expect this paper will appeal to scholars who study engineering practice, and those who are interested in contemporary innovations in ethnographic and other qualitative research methods. 

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