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Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Racial Equity in STEM Education Program, this project aims to deeply interrogate the influence and pervasiveness of Whiteness in engineering culture. While there has been substantial research into the masculinity of engineering, Whiteness has received far less attention. We claim the centrality of Whiteness in engineering curricula informs the culture, climate, and discourse of engineering education, leading to an exclusionary culture within engineering as reflected by the lack of diversity and lower retention of students and faculty of color, and contributes to systemic barriers negatively impacting racial equity. Moving towards racial equity in engineering education requires a fundamental shift in thinking in two important ways: 1) we must reframe how we think about underserved populations from minority to minoritized by a dominant discourse, and 2) to begin to dismantle the impacts of Whiteness, we must first make this barrier visible. In the first year of this project, the diverse team of PIs began to explore scripts of Whiteness in engineering education by conducting a collaborative autoethnography through documenting and analyzing their own experiences facing, enacting, and challenging scripts of Whiteness in engineering spaces. A collaborative autoethnography (CAE) takes a collaborative approach to the process of critical self reflection and can be conducted in many forms, such as such as collecting personal memory data (e.g., journaling), interviewing each other, facilitating intentional dialogue, or observing each other (e.g., in the classroom). CAE is not a linear process, but requires an ongoing dialogue (conversations, negotiations, or even arguments) between researcher team members over a long period (at least months, if not years). Our diverse viewpoints and years-long experience working together facilitated rich conversations that let us interrogate the ways in which Whiteness reveals its form differently depending on one’s positionality. In the later years of the project, we will create a faculty development program intended to help engineering faculty develop their critical consciousness and begin to decenter Whiteness from their ways of thinking and discourses (i.e., beliefs, attitudes, value systems, actions, etc.) so they can begin to critically think about promoting and enacting practices that move engineering education toward racial equity. Although the pathway to critical consciousness is not linear, it is a one-way street; once faculty begin to see the systemic barriers (such as those created by scripts of Whiteness) around them, there is no going back. In the long term, we hope to lay the groundwork for recognizing, interrogating, and eventually dismantling forces of systemic oppression in engineering higher education.
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Scripts of Whiteness in engineering: An analysis of the literature
Previous research in engineering education has identified the characteristics and behaviors associated with being an engineer, including aspects such as dress norms, professionalism, and standards. These studies have also explored the reasons why historically marginalized students may experience a sense of alienation from the engineering field. In the realm of engineering, learning how to become an engineer is shaped through the hidden curriculum, everyday interactions and the cognitive dynamics that are involved in those interactions. These cognitive dynamics are called “scripts” and they involve the schemas and frames of reference that build one’s engineering identity. As individuals engage with the field, they develop scripts by adopting the behaviors and traits that are recognized as traditional characteristics of engineers by their mentors, professors, peers, industry leaders, and others within the engineering community. Young engineers learn to employ the language, phrases, practices, skills, values, and beliefs that signify their acquisition of the social constructs associated with the engineering world while allowing them to acculturate within their respected field . Moreover, engineering scripts often center around whiteness – a socially constructed formation that functions as a system of social control. Some examples of whiteness include the racialization of students of color and their portrayal as incapable of performing in engineering (i.e., deficit ideologies), the idea that engineering knowledge is only constructed in English (i.e., language subtraction), or the perception that people are selected to engineering spaces just based on ability (i.e., meritocracy). In this paper, we analyze current literature in engineering education research to argue that scripts of whiteness in engineering are detrimental for women and people of color because they keep racialization in engineering spaces in perpetual motion. We posit that individuals in engineering spaces are not only conditioned to scripts of whiteness but also become the bearers of racialized hierarchical classifications to maintain power and sustain systemic barriers in engineering education. Guided by the questions: (1) how is whiteness interpreted and manifested in engineering and (2) what common scripts of whiteness are prevalent in engineering spaces, a systemic review of the literature was performed. Given that the research on whiteness in engineering is not very extensive, the literature review was not limited to journals in engineering education research but also those published in journals such as in higher education, science education, and counseling psychology. We argue that the lack of diversity in engineering is a direct outcome of a system that perpetuates white supremacy to actively keep students of color away, and we suggest that engineering education research cannot move forward toward racial equity unless these scripts are identified and challenged rather than being considered part of the “engineering culture.” Future work will explore how these scripts are developed, maintained, and promoted in engineering.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2140646
- PAR ID:
- 10523599
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Conferences
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Arlington, Virginia
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--45475
