Search for: All records

In this special session, we invited participants to identify how they might be interacting with cultures of anti-Blackness of engineering education environments through the potent experience of racial shame. The facilitators, informed by their respective backgrounds in anti-racism and professional shame, guided the participants through an interactive series of activities that inspire reflective thinking and, more importantly, a commitment to act to bolster justice and equity in engineering education cultures. 

Purpose The goal of this study is to explore an immediate step in understanding the lived experiences of under-represented students through metaphor construction and possibly collect more in-depth data through photograph-based interviews. Design/Methodology/Approach This article introduced photo-elicitation based narrative interviews as a qualitative methodology while interviewing fourteen undergraduate community college students mostly from underrepresented groups (URGs). At the beginning of each interview, the authors probed the participants with 8 photographs chosen by the research team to represent a diverse set of experiences in engineering. The authors conducted a thematic analysis of the interview data. Findings The findings suggested that the inclusion of photo-elicitation often catalyzed consumption of representations, images, metaphors, and voice to stories passed unnoticed; and finally produces more detailed descriptions and complements semi-structured narrative interviews. Research Limitations/Implications This study advances the scholarship that extends photograph driven interviews/photo elicitation methodology while interviewing marginalized population and offers a roadmap for what a multi-modal, arts-based analysis process might look like for in-depth interviews. Practical Implications The use of photo-elicitation in our research enabled a deeper, more poignant exploration of the URG students' experience of navigating engineering. The participants were able to relate to the photographs and shared their life narratives through them; hence, use of photographs can be adapted in future research. Social Implications Our research revealed that PEI has excellent potential to capture marginalized narratives of URGs, which is not well explored in educational research, specially, in higher education. In our research, PEI promoted more culturally inclusive approaches positioning the participants as experts of their own narratives. Originality/Value The study presented in this paper serves as an example of qualitative research that expands methodological boundaries and centers the role of power, marginalization, and creativity in research. This work serves as a unique and important contribution to the photo-elicitation literature, offering a critical roadmap for researchers who are drawn to photo elicitation/photograph driven interviews as a method to explore their inquiry. 

Abstract BackgroundBlack engineering graduate students represent a critical and understudied population in engineering education. Gaining an understanding of the lived experiences of Black engineering graduate students while they are simultaneously weathering two pandemics, COVID‐19 and systemic racism, is of paramount importance. Purpose/HypothesisBlack engineering graduate students hold a unique duality, as both Black people in the United States and Black graduate students in US engineering programs that espouse white supremacist ideals. Their real‐world experiences necessitate understanding, and this paper highlights the related impact on the students themselves, their adaptations to the pandemics, and how those adaptations relate to and affect their support needs and navigation of their engineering academic environments. Design/MethodAn interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) approach was combined with community‐based participatory action research and was situated in Boykin's Triple Quandary. A family check‐in was conducted with 10 Black engineering graduate students enrolled in doctoral programs across the country to delve deep into their lived experience as a cultural community. ResultsFindings include an emergent framework of Black engineering graduate student values in response to the pandemics. These values aligned with the Black Cultural Ethos, demonstrating an adoption of collectivistic cultural values in times of crises. Further, COVID‐19 and systemic racism differentially impacted Black engineering graduate students and, thus, the manifestations of their values. ConclusionFor institutions to be able to effectively support their Black engineering graduate students, they must gain awareness of the students' experiences, values, and needs, in general, and amid crises specifically. The findings presented here provide a critical window into this information. 

Abstract Previous research exploring the lived experiences of marginalized groups of students in STEM at community college settings is limited, despite the fact that community colleges have the potential to create pathways to 4‐year engineering degrees and diversify the STEM workforce. This study explored what underrepresented students in STEM valued most as they navigated community college. We conducted nineteen semi‐structured narrative interviews. Our findings suggested that the students found some of the values implicit compared to other explicit values mentioned by the participants. For example, they valued intimate class size, invested faculty, available tutors, and financial support as explicit values. They appreciated the low‐pressure environment, directional support, networking opportunities, and hands‐on learning as implicit values associated with their college experience. Our research has a direct implication on how such experiences influence students’ chosen pathways toward engineering careers, and institutions can learn directly to establish programs with an understanding of what they value.