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1. 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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2. 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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3. 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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4. Engineering technology, anthropology, and business: Reflections of graduate student researchers in the pursuit of transdisciplinary learning

   Martinez, R; Lucas, D (June 2024, American Society of Engineering Education)

   To pursue transdisciplinary education, bringing together different disciplinary perspectives is necessary. As two graduate researchers, in engineering technology and anthropology, on a National Science Foundation (NSF) Improving Undergraduate STEM Education research project, we want to embody and explore our role in the journey to pursue transdisciplinary education. Our familiarity with higher education as students, our different disciplinary backgrounds and lived experiences, and our training as an engineering technology educator and a social scientist contribute greatly to the advancement of understanding the project. Harnessing our combined expertise enables us to see collaborative co-teaching, group learning, and student engagement in new ways. Often transdisciplinary education research is approached from siloed disciplines or from a single perspective and not inclusive of graduate students' perspectives. We find ourselves working on a collaborative cross-college project between three different colleges, Business, Engineering Technology, and Liberal Arts, where faculty and students are co-teaching and co-learning in a series of design and innovation courses. A key element of this project is gathering and using stakeholder data from students, faculty, and administrators. Midway through our three-year project, the NSF project’s external reviewer highlighted the crucial value added of having graduate researchers looking at transforming higher education towards transdisciplinarity. With that in mind, we offer some guiding thoughts about collaborative research among graduate students and faculty from different academic disciplines. This includes tips on how we collaborated in coding, analysis, and data presentations. Using project examples, we will discuss how we used tools for collaboration such as NVivo Teams and Microsoft Teams; these platforms aided in contributing to the iterative research design of this project and research outputs. Our process was strengthened by active participation in project meetings with faculty, educational community events, and data review sessions to reach data consensus. We have noticed how transdisciplinarity can transform undergraduate learning and encourage cross-college faculty collaboration. We will reflect on the significance of collaboration at all levels of higher education. Furthermore, this experience has set us on the path to becoming transdisciplinary scholars ourselves. 

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5. Work in Progress: Opportunities for Engineering Undergraduates to Develop Non-Technical Professional Skills during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

   Guanes, G.; Bill, V.; Li, T.; Martin, J. P.; Holloway, E.A.; Douglas, K. A. (July 2023, ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore, MD)

   This work-in-progress (WIP) paper aims to elucidate how students have developed professional skills since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and who are the people who have provided skill development opportunities. Because of the way social distancing affected engineering education during the pandemic, developing professional skills may have been a challenge for engineering students. While online courses and virtual meetings allowed students to remain in contact with faculty and each other, the opportunities to continue having deep relationships (i.e., strong ties) were sparse. Our paper presents an early look at findings from the qualitative phase of an explanatory mixed methods study conducted with 1,234 undergraduates from 13 schools in the US. Our ongoing thematic qualitative analysis reveals that the changes that accompanied social distancing and periods of emergency remote teaching caused by COVID-19 have reinforced different opportunities to develop professional skills than prior to the pandemic. While some students expressed they had fewer opportunities to develop professional skills, participants also identified opportunities to (1) hone written communication skills when inperson discussions were reduced and (2) leverage knowledge from family members to continue developing professionally. Our next steps include finishing the qualitative analysis phase of the project and mixing the qualitative and quantitative data to develop overarching findings that the engineering education community can use to understand how students’ professional skills develop and how to promote that development even during times of educational disruption. 

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