More Like this

1. Connection and alienation during the COVID ‐19 pandemic: The narratives of four engineering students

   https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20519  

   McIntyre, Brianna Benedict ; Rohde, Jacqueline ; Clements, Herman Ronald ; Godwin, Allison ( March 2023 , Journal of Engineering Education)

   The COVID‐19 pandemic has highlighted, exacerbated, and caused many challenges within engineering education. At the same time, the pandemic provided opportunities for engineering educators to learn from forced change to promote strategic efforts to improve classroom engagement and connection to better support engineering students.

   We leveraged students' stories to discuss ways university administrators, faculty, and instructors can better support their students during times of global crisis and beyond the current pandemic.

   We conducted longitudinal narrative interviews with four White women engineering students from different universities in their third and fourth years. The students were selected from a larger research project because their rich and reflective stories resonated with other participant narratives, the research team, and ongoing conversations about educating during and after the COVID‐19 pandemic. Through narrative inquiry, we constructed “restoryed” vignettes and identified patterns within the four students' distinctive stories by drawing on a theoretical framework designed to examine connection and alienation.

   The findings provided insights into how students were stressed and disconnected from their education in undesirable ways. The findings also provide insight into how those same students received support and maintained a connection to their institution, advisors, and instructors that educators could emulate.

   Our theoretical framework of connection and alienation proved helpful for understanding the experiences of four engineering students. Additionally, these stories provide practical examples of how faculty and staff can support student connections beyond the pandemic.

    

   more » « less
2. Childhood adversity during the post‐apartheid transition and COVID ‐19 stress independently predict adult PTSD risk in urban S outh A frica: A biocultural analysis of the stress sensitization hypothesis

   https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.24791  

   Kim, Andrew Wooyoung ; Said Mohamed, Rihlat ; Norris, Shane A. ; Naicker, Sara ; Richter, Linda M. ; Kuzawa, Christopher W. ( June 2023 , American Journal of Biological Anthropology)

   The COVID‐19 pandemic in South Africa introduced new societal adversities and mental health threats in a country where one in three individuals are expected to develop a psychiatric condition sometime in their life. Scientists have suggested that psychosocial stress and trauma during childhood may increase one's vulnerability to the mental health consequences of future stressors—a process known as stress sensitization. This prospective analysis assessed whether childhood adversity experienced among South African children across the first 18 years of life, coinciding with the post‐apartheid transition, exacerbates the mental health impacts of psychosocial stress experienced during the 2019 coronavirus (COVID‐19) pandemic (ca. 2020–2021).

   Data came from 88 adults who participated in a follow‐up study of a longitudinal birth cohort study in Soweto, South Africa. Childhood adversity and COVID‐19 psychosocial stress were assessed as primary predictors of adult PTSD risk, and an interaction term between childhood adversity and COVID‐19 stress was calculated to evaluate the potential effect of stress sensitization.

   Fifty‐six percent of adults exhibited moderate‐to‐severe PTSD symptoms. Greater childhood adversity and higher COVID‐19 psychosocial stress independently predicted worse post‐traumatic stress disorder symptoms in adults. Adults who reported greater childhood adversity exhibited non‐significantly worse PTSD symptoms from COVID‐19 psychosocial stress.

   These results highlight the deleterious mental health effects of both childhood trauma and COVID‐19 psychosocial stress in our sample and emphasize the need for greater and more accessible mental health support as the pandemic progresses in South Africa.

    

   more » « less
3. Resiliency through partnerships: Prioritizing STEM workforce pathways amid macro challenges

   https://doi.org/10.1111/ssm.12575  

   Mathieson, Danny ; Cotrupi, Catherine ; Schilling, Malle ; Grohs, Jake ( April 2023 , School Science and Mathematics)

   Multi‐institutional educational partnerships are a promising approach to developing the skilled technical workforce. Inexorably, the ability to maintain such partnership networks that support skilled technical workforce education was disrupted by COVID‐19. The purpose of this study is to explore Southwest Virginia's science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)‐focused multi‐institutional partnership networks, to inventory the disruptive impacts of COVID‐19, and to identify how partnership stakeholders navigated these challenges to prepare students for the skilled technical workforce. This work presents a single‐case study design, highlighting the evolving landscape of STEM workforce education partnership networks in Southwest Virginia throughout the pandemic. The team conducted interviews with 19 regional stakeholders focused on the participants' role throughout the pandemic, barriers to STEM workforce education presented by public health and economic factors, and innovative strategies to sustain and expand partnership networks through COVID‐19. Two key themes emerged from this study: successful partners maintained network connections through adaptive interactions and actors within the network served as brokers to leverage their connections and expand partnerships in the face of adversity. By taking a contextual view of the role of partnership networks in creating equitable STEM workforce pathways during COVID‐19, we develop rich insights into partnership formation, collaboration, resource allocation, and programming amidst challenges to their success.

    

   more » « less
4. The correlation between undergraduate student diversity and the representation of women of color faculty in engineering

   https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20361  

   Main, Joyce_B ; Tan, Li ; Cox, Monica_F ; McGee, Ebony_O ; Katz, Andrew ( October 2020 , Journal of Engineering Education)

   Despite the critical role of faculty diversity in the persistence and academic experiences of undergraduate students as well as in the development of engineering innovations, women of color (WoC) faculty are still underrepresented in engineering programs across the United States.

   This study identifies whether the demographic composition of undergraduate engineering students is correlated with the representation of WoC faculty. It also highlights the institutional‐ and departmental‐level factors that contribute to the race–gender diversification of the engineering professoriate.

   Informed by organizational demography as the theoretical framework, the methods include linear and logit regression analyses. Data come from the American Society for Engineering Education, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, and the American Community Survey, and include engineering departmental‐level observations across 345 institutions over 12 years.

   Engineering departments that award more bachelor's degrees to women African American/Black undergraduate students are more likely to employ relatively more African American/Black women faculty. This positive relationship is also found among Asian Americans and Hispanics/Latinas.

   Research findings demonstrate the relationship between engineering undergraduate composition, as well as other departmental‐ and institutional‐level factors, and the prevalence of WoC faculty. The findings highlight important areas for stakeholders and academic administrators to consider when developing strategies and programs to diversify the composition of engineering faculty.

    

   more » « less
5. Comparative Study of the Intersection of Engineering Identify and Black Identity of African-American Engineering Students at a PWI and an HBCU

   Berhan, L. ; Kumar, R. ; Goodloe, M. ; Jones, J. ; Adams, A. ( June 2018 , ASEE annual conference & exposition)

   This interdisciplinary, inter-institutional research initiation project is motivated by the need to develop practical strategies for broadening the participation of African American students in engineering. The central objective of the project is to conduct a comparative study of the factors affecting the success and pathways to engineering careers of African American students at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI), the University of Toledo, and a Historically Black University (Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University). Through this research we hope to gain insight into the factors affecting the social and academic well-being of students at PWIs and HBCUs from a psychological and anthropological perspective. For students from underrepresented groups in STEM at both HBCUs and PWIs it is generally recognized that social capital in the form of familial, peer and mentor support is critical to persistence in their major field of study. However, the role that embedded networks within student groups in general, and minority engineering affinity groups in particular, play in engineering students’ identity formation and academic success is not well understood. It is also not clear how other factors including institutional support and the attitudes and beliefs of faculty and staff toward underrepresented minority students affect the ability of these students to integrate into the social and academic systems at their institutions and how these factors influence the formation and development of their identities as engineers. Here we report on the role of membership in organizations for underrepresented minority engineering students such as the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) in contributing to the interlinking of personal and professional identities, and to the career pathways of African American students enrolled in PWI and HBCU, respectively. 

   more » « less