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The purpose of this exploratory special issue study was to understand the hidden curriculum (HC), or the unwritten, unofficial, or unintended lessons, around the professionalization of engineering faculty across institutions of higher education. Additionally, how engineering faculty connected the role of HC awareness, emotions, self-efficacy, and self-advocacy concepts was studied. A mixed-method survey was disseminated to 55 engineering faculties across 54 institutions of higher education in the United States. Quantitative questions, which centered around the influences that gender, race, faculty rank, and institutional type played in participants’ responses was analyzed using a combination of decision tree analysis with chi-square and correlational analysis. Qualitative questions were analyzed by a combination of tone-, open-, and focused-coding. The findings pointed to the primary roles that gender and institutional type (e.g., Tier 1) played in issues of fulfilling the professional expectations of the field. Furthermore, it was found that HC awareness and emotions and HC awareness and self-efficacy had moderate positive correlations, whereas, compared to self-advocacy, it had weak, negative correlations. Together, the findings point to the complex understandings and intersectional lived realities of many engineering faculty and hopes that through its findings can create awareness of the challenges and obstacles present in these professional environments. 

Hidden curriculum (HC) consist of the particular assumptions that are held by individuals about schooling that are manifested in practice (Smith, 2014). These assumptions can be recognized through socio cultural interactions, experiences with their physical surroundings, or exposure to virtual environments (The Glossary of Education Reform, 2017; Killick , 2016; Margolis, 2001; Smith, 2014). HC has been explored widely in fields such as education, psychology, business, and medicine (Baird, Bracken, & Grierson, 2016; Borges, Ferreira, Borges de Oliveria , Macini , Caldana , 2017; Cotton, Winter, & Bailey, 2013; Joughin , 2010; Margolis, 2001; Rabah , 2012; Smith, 2014) but is relatively unaddressed in engineering (Erickson, 2007; Villanueva et al., 2018) and more specifically neither the positive or negative implications of HC in engineering have been explored. This study sought to use a mixed method approach to understand the mechanisms behind HC recognition (via emotions and self efficacy) for engineering students and faculty nationwide.