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1. Board 195: Amplifying Voices for Change: Exploring Faculty Insights on Student Audio Narratives Through Focus Group Discussions

   McCall, C; Secules, S; Van_Dyke, G; Kali, M B; Tran, V (June 2024, Proceedings of the 2024 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference)

   The inclusive transformation of engineering culture stands as a central objective for ensuring the growth and sustainability of a diverse engineering workforce. Engineering faculty members play a critical role in this transformation by supporting and shaping the academic journeys and eventual careers of their students. However, despite their central role in workforce development, faculty members often lack the resources and training needed to gain a deeper understanding of the diverse experiences and identities their students bring to the engineering classroom. This is especially challenging for students with minoritized identities that are non-apparent or hidden and cannot be easily observed by faculty. As part of the on-going Audio for Inclusion (A4I) Project, this paper and poster discuss the initial findings from focus groups with nine engineering faculty members from three universities nationwide. We delve into the intricacies and logistics of developing, designing, and facilitating these focus groups and highlight significant alterations and overall recommendations shared by participants. These perspectives can serve as a valuable resource for engineering educators seeking to incorporate similar audio dissemination methods into their work and for those interested in implementing strategies for cultivating a more inclusive engineering education culture. 

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2. Board 195: Amplifying Voices for Change: Exploring Faculty Insights on Student Audio Narratives Through Focus Group Discussions

   McCall, Cassandra; Secules, Stephen; Van_Dyke, Gabriel; Kali, Maimuna Begum; Tran, Vanessa (June 2024, ASEE PEER Document Repository)

   The inclusive transformation of engineering culture stands as a central objective for ensuring the growth and sustainability of a diverse engineering workforce. Engineering faculty members play a critical role in this transformation by supporting and shaping the academic journeys and eventual careers of their students. However, despite their central role in workforce development, faculty members often lack the resources and training needed to gain a deeper understanding of the diverse experiences and identities their students bring to the engineering classroom. This is especially challenging for students with minoritized identities that are non-apparent or hidden and cannot be easily observed by faculty. As part of the on-going Audio for Inclusion (A4I) Project, this paper and poster discuss the initial findings from focus groups with nine engineering faculty members from three universities nationwide. We delve into the intricacies and logistics of developing, designing, and facilitating these focus groups and highlight significant alterations and overall recommendations shared by participants. These perspectives can serve as a valuable resource for engineering educators seeking to incorporate similar audio dissemination methods into their work and for those interested in implementing strategies for cultivating a more inclusive engineering education culture. 

   more » « less
3. Board 195: Amplifying Voices for Change: Exploring Faculty Insights on Student Audio Narratives through Focus Group Discussions

   McCall, C; Secules, S; Van_Dyke, G; Kali, M B; Tran, V (June 2024, Proceedings of the 2024 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference)

   The inclusive transformation of engineering culture stands as a central objective for ensuring the growth and sustainability of a diverse engineering workforce. Engineering faculty members play a critical role in this transformation by supporting and shaping the academic journeys and eventual careers of their students. However, despite their central role in workforce development, faculty members often lack the resources and training needed to gain a deeper understanding of the diverse experiences and identities their students bring to the engineering classroom. This is especially challenging for students with minoritized identities that are non-apparent or hidden and cannot be easily observed by faculty. As part of the on-going Audio for Inclusion (A4I) Project, this paper and poster discuss the initial findings from focus groups with nine engineering faculty members from three universities nationwide. We delve into the intricacies and logistics of developing, designing, and facilitating these focus groups and highlight significant alterations and overall recommendations shared by participants. These perspectives can serve as a valuable resource for engineering educators seeking to incorporate similar audio dissemination methods into their work and for those interested in implementing strategies for cultivating a more inclusive engineering education culture. 

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4. Board 220: Audio for Inclusion: Broadening Participation in Engineering Through Audio Dissemination of Marginalized Students’ Narratives

   Secules, Stephen; McCall, Cassandra; Kali, Maimuna Begum; Van Dyke, Gabe (June 2023, ASEE annual conference exposition)

   The transformation of engineering culture towards inclusion is a key objective in the retention and professionalization of a diverse engineering workforce. Faculty are key stakeholders impacting that inclusion because of their prominent role in shaping students’ underrepresented, marginalized, and/or hidden identities and core experiences in engineering classrooms. Yet, many faculty are not provided with practicable resources and training that can enrich their knowledge, empathy, and understanding of students’ diverse and marginalized experiences that differ from their own. This lack of resources has slowed the transformation of engineering culture and provides an opportunity for practical impact by researchers and faculty developers. However, the topic of developing inclusive culture remains understudied and has evaded traditional approaches to education research. Quantitative approaches can broadly identify the presence of marginalization or inclusion, but they lack the nuance to enhance a reader’s inclusive understanding. In contrast, qualitative and narrative-based approaches provide rich accounts of marginalized experiences and perspectives, but do not typically reach a broad audience of technical engineering faculty. Thus, these accounts are often disseminated to faculty and researchers already interested and invested in broadening participation, perpetuating a cycle of “preaching to the choir”. In the Audio for Inclusion project, we answer BPE’s call for innovative methods that increase research impact on broadening participation outcomes by proposing a novel audio narrative dissemination approach to foster inclusive understandings for engineering faculty. Specifically, we ask the following research questions: ● What marginalized student narratives related to identity and agency are present in engineering educational culture? ● How does hearing these narratives impact faculty perspectives of diversity and inclusion in engineering classrooms? This interactive poster presents the student audio narratives developed so far and overviews the entire project. 

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5. 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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