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1. Exploring composite narratives as a methodology to understand and share research findings in engineering education

   Sajadi, Susan; Kellam, Nadia N.; Brunhaver, Samantha R. (June 2023, American Society for Engineering Education)

   In this methods paper, the development and utility of composite narratives will be explored. Composite narratives, which involve combining aspects of multiple interviews into a single narrative, are a relatively modern methodology used in the qualitative research literature for several purposes: to do justice to complex accounts while maintaining participant anonymity, summarize data in a more engaging personal form and retain the human face of the data, illustrate specific aspects of the research findings, enhance the transferability of research findings by invoking empathy, illuminate collective experiences, and enhance research impact by providing findings in a manner more accessible to those outside of academia. Composite narratives leverage the power of storytelling, which has shown to be effective in studies of neurology and psychology; i.e., since humans often think and process information in narrative structures, the information conveyed in story form can be imprinted more easily on readers’ minds or existing schema. Engineering education researchers have increasingly begun using narrative research methods. Recently, researchers have begun exploring composite narratives as an approach to enable more complex and nuanced understandings of engineering education while mitigating potential issues around the confidentiality of participants. Because this is a relatively new methodology in higher education more broadly and in engineering education specifically, more examples of how to construct and utilize composite narratives in both research and practice are needed. This paper will share how we created a composite narrative from interviews we collected for our work so that others can adapt this methodology for their research projects. The paper will also discuss ways we modified and enhanced these narratives to connect research to practice and impact engineering students. This approach involved developing probing questions to stimulate thinking, learning, and discussion in academic and industrial educational settings. We developed the composite narratives featured in this paper from fifteen semi-structured critical incident interviews with engineering managers about their perceptions of adaptability. The critical incidents shared were combined to develop seven composite narratives reflecting real-life situations to which engineers must adapt in the workplace. These scenarios, grounded in the data, were taken directly to the engineering classroom for discussion with students on how they would respond and adapt to the presented story. In this paper, we detail our process of creating one composite narrative from the broader study and its associated probing questions for research dissemination in educational settings. We present this detailed account of how one composite narrative was constructed to demonstrate the quality and trustworthiness of the composite narrative methodology and assist in its replication by other scholars. Further, we discuss the benefits and limitations of this methodology, highlighting the parts of the data brought into focus using this method and how that contrasts with an inductive-deductive approach to qualitative coding also taken in this research project. 

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2. Minoritized Student Audio Narratives to Influence Faculty’s Empathic Understanding: Learning from Sophie and Enola

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--45461  

   Secules, Stephen; Kali, Maimuna Begum; McCall, Cassandra; Van_Dyke, Gabriel (February 2024, ASEE Conferences)

   Background: Undergraduate engineering education is a critical moment for student experiences and broadening participation, yet many minoritized students experience it as unwelcoming, unsupportive, or exclusionary. Engineering faculty have a central role and responsibility to play in the creation of inclusive classrooms, yet there is a gap in empathic communication for faculty to better understand their students. Education researchers can play a critical role in addressing this communication and empathy gap, but disseminating research findings in long form papers is not accessible for most engineering faculty. Purpose: This paper highlights the audio narratives created through the Audio for Inclusion project, an NSF-funded project intended to help faculty become more aware of students’ hidden and marginalized identities and impacts of those identities on their engineering education experiences. Method: We conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews with 22 nationally recruited undergraduate engineering students and turned these into 10 distinct audio narratives. Our narrative analysis focused on constructing a cohesive, concise, and anonymized narrative that would present key content from student interviews in a format that would preserve some of the immediacy and emotionality of student interviews while improving accessibility and coherence for faculty. Findings: In this paper, we present the scripts and link to audio narratives for two student participants: 1) Sophie, a mixed race (Asian and white) white-passing woman, and 2) Enola, an Indigenous woman. In addition to presenting the written and audio narrative, we comment on the specific lessons we see as valuable for engineering faculty that emerge from each of the audio narratives. Conclusion: This project highlights lessons learned for faculty in the areas of student support, accommodations, inclusive practice, and student perceptions of classroom practice. We present this project as methodological innovation for qualitative research, and as future work, we intend to keep investigating impact on faculty via faculty focus groups, surveys, and workshops. We also highlight this research as a metaphor for the empathic understanding that each faculty member can gain by listening to students, individually and collectively, and distilling lessons for their practice. 

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3. Minoritized Student Audio Narratives to Influence Faculty’s Empathic Understanding: Learning from Sophie and Enola

   Secules, S; Kali, M B; McCall, C; Van_Dyke, G (June 2024, Proceedings of the 2024 Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity Conference)

   Background: Undergraduate engineering education is a critical moment for student experiences and broadening participation, yet many minoritized students experience it as unwelcoming, unsupportive, or exclusionary. Engineering faculty have a central role and responsibility to play in the creation of inclusive classrooms, yet there is a gap in empathic communication for faculty to better understand their students. Education researchers can play a critical role in addressing this communication and empathy gap, but disseminating research findings in long form papers is not accessible for most engineering faculty. Purpose: This paper highlights the audio narratives created through the Audio for Inclusion project, an NSF-funded project intended to help faculty become more aware of students’ hidden and marginalized identities and impacts of those identities on their engineering education experiences. Method: We conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews with 22 nationally recruited undergraduate engineering students and turned these into 10 distinct audio narratives. Our narrative analysis focused on constructing a cohesive, concise, and anonymized narrative that would present key content from student interviews in a format that would preserve some of the immediacy and emotionality of student interviews while improving accessibility and coherence for faculty. Findings: In this paper, we present the scripts and link to audio narratives for two student participants: 1) Sophie, a mixed race (Asian and white) white-passing woman, and 2) Enola, an Indigenous woman. In addition to presenting the written and audio narrative, we comment on the specific lessons we see as valuable for engineering faculty that emerge from each of the audio narratives. Conclusion: This project highlights lessons learned for faculty in the areas of student support, accommodations, inclusive practice, and student perceptions of classroom practice. We present this project as methodological innovation for qualitative research, and as future work, we intend to keep investigating impact on faculty via faculty focus groups, surveys, and workshops. We also highlight this research as a metaphor for the empathic understanding that each faculty member can gain by listening to students, individually and collectively, and distilling lessons for their practice. 

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4. Minoritized Student Audio Narratives to Influence Faculty’s Empathic Understanding: Learning from Sophie and Enola

   Secules, S; McCall, C; Kali, M B; Van_Dyke, G (February 2024, Proceedings of the 2024 Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity (CoNECD) Conference)

   Background: Undergraduate engineering education is a critical moment for student experiences and broadening participation, yet many minoritized students experience it as unwelcoming, unsupportive, or exclusionary. Engineering faculty have a central role and responsibility to play in the creation of inclusive classrooms, yet there is a gap in empathic communication for faculty to better understand their students. Education researchers can play a critical role in addressing this communication and empathy gap, but disseminating research findings in long form papers is not accessible for most engineering faculty. Purpose: This paper highlights the audio narratives created through the Audio for Inclusion project, an NSF-funded project intended to help faculty become more aware of students’ hidden and marginalized identities and impacts of those identities on their engineering education experiences. Method: We conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews with 22 nationally recruited undergraduate engineering students and turned these into 10 distinct audio narratives. Our narrative analysis focused on constructing a cohesive, concise, and anonymized narrative that would present key content from student interviews in a format that would preserve some of the immediacy and emotionality of student interviews while improving accessibility and coherence for faculty. Findings: In this paper, we present the scripts and link to audio narratives for two student participants: 1) Sophie, a mixed race (Asian and white) white-passing woman, and 2) Enola, an Indigenous woman. In addition to presenting the written and audio narrative, we comment on the specific lessons we see as valuable for engineering faculty that emerge from each of the audio narratives. Conclusion: This project highlights lessons learned for faculty in the areas of student support, accommodations, inclusive practice, and student perceptions of classroom practice. We present this project as methodological innovation for qualitative research, and as future work, we intend to keep investigating impact on faculty via faculty focus groups, surveys, and workshops. We also highlight this research as a metaphor for the empathic understanding that each faculty member can gain by listening to students, individually and collectively, and distilling lessons for their practice. 

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5. Suggestions for Responsible Qualitative Research with Transgender Engineering Students Using an Auto-Ethnographic Approach

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE43999.2019.9028639  

   Jennings, M.; Kellam, N.; Coley, B.; Boklage, A. (January 2019, Frontiers in Education)

   null (Ed.)

   "Abstract—The need for increasing diversity in engineering has paved the road for a rich wealth of literature exploring the experiences of marginalized students in these spaces. Much of this literature utilizes qualitative methodology to understand the experiences of these students, as told through their own words. However, work of this nature can often be influenced by the implicit biases that the researcher carries, as well as the inherent misalignment of power present between researcher and participant. These misalignments may be exacerbated when the researcher is interviewing a marginalized participant, while not identifying as part of a marginalized identity themselves. Students within the LGBTQ+ community may reside at multiple marginalized identities, and as such, the issues surrounding interviewing marginalized identities can be compounded further. Even the most well-intentioned and experienced researcher may find themselves in an interview with a marginalized individual in which implicit biases and unspoken power structures alter the trajectory of the interview. This paper seeks to provide an auto- ethnographic reflection by the first author on the interview of a transgender research participant, while simultaneously providing an opportunity to identify ways in which her interview could have been methodologically improved. This will be accomplished by the first author’s analysis of the interview and meta-data. This analysis is valuable, as the first author identifies as a member of the LGBTQ+ engineering community herself." 

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