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The study of gender in engineering continues to be highly relevant due to the persistence of the field’s domination by men and masculinity. Mainstream discourse on gender in STEM, however, has been kept in a “black box” for decades according to Allison Phipps [1]. She states that the reliance on a simplistic gender binary unaccompanied by racial, cultural, or sexual identity nuances undermines engineering’s own political aims of gender equity. One large gap in our existing body of gender research and discourse is how the highly gendered landscape of engineering education is experienced transgender or gender nonconforming (TGNC) people. We are opening the “black box” on gender in our research project “Invisibilized Gendered Experiences: Transgender and Gender-nonconforming Experiences in Engineering Education.” The research project contains three key objectives: 1) To infuse queer studies and feminist research methodologies into engineering education research practice 2). To record, examine, and share the wide range of experiences from TGNC engineering students to our research community, and 3). To collaborate with the student community to inform the research products for engineering educators and researchers. This presentation will first introduce the audience to conceptualizations of gender informed by contemporary queer theory, which defines gender as a fluid and dynamic social system beyond biological binaries. Next, we will use our own research project as an example of how we can transform our approach to the study of gender through feminist research methodologies that place the subject community as the experts on their lived experiences. We end by sharing prominent themes from the 300 national participants in our initial community outreach questionnaire. This final portion provides ideas offered by the undergraduate TGNC population on how to build a more supportive and inclusive environment for their success. Altogether, this presentation provides a comprehensive look at our project on gender resiliency by TGNC students in engineering education. 

Undergraduate programs in engineering are demanding, time consuming, and inherently social endeavors for young adults. Strong social support networks and communities which foster success are frequently found to increase student retention and perseverance through their engineering degree programs. Students with marginalized identities in higher education are met with additional workloads – managing their social identity, negotiating stereotypes, and finding belonging. Existing research shows that a student’s experience in in higher education is particularly shaped by gender interactions. This has been shown to be particularly true in engineering, whose gender demographics and professional culture is described as hegemonically masculine. Research on gender in engineering has typically framed gender within a rigid, essentialized cisgender binary. Current literature is lacking detail on the processes used by gender diverse students in the transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) community as they navigate the gendered engineering field. We wish to highlight the experiences that undergraduate engineering students have had in relation to their social support and perceptions of gender as it relates to engineering culture within their undergraduate programs. Two students participated in autoethnography as a method of data collection to meet this objective. Collaborative autoethnographic methods position the students as coauthors and coresearchers to ensure the validity of analysis alongside the project’s primary investigators. Using a resiliency framework and critical autoethnographic analysis, the primary focus is on the ways these students have formed support systems and their perception of the social landscape in engineering. Through exploring how students persevere through their programs we may uncover points of intervention to strengthen these support systems. 

Describing how knowledge is used on interdisciplinary projects differs between cognitive scientists and academics. This study aims to explore how knowledge is categorized by practicing engineers in the context of an interdisciplinary engineering project through the use of phenomenological interviews with practicing engineers. Findings suggest that engineers classify knowledge based on the functional parts of systems and subsystems. While this method of classification has overlap with academics use of the construct “disciplines” and cognitive scientists’ use of the construct “domains,” dissimilar aspects could impact how knowledge is accessed and utilized in the future by students in engineering programs 

This paper is a research paper. Many engineering problems require efficient coordination across disciplinary boundaries. Few studies exist about how engineers negotiate and coordinate the knowledge required for working across these boundaries on large, intricate engineering problems. We approach knowledge as a complex and socially constructed system. Knowledge systems are inherently difficult to study because they are dynamic and ephemeral: they are only visible in interactions among the individuals of the community. The purpose of this research is to gain a better understanding of the knowledge system of practicing engineers through ethnographic observations of their practices. We used an ethnography-inspired situative approach based on observable knowledge practices to study the knowledge system of practicing engineers. Data was collected through observation of a Critical Design Review (CDR) of a satellite project at NASA. A CDR occurs after the technical design and specifications of a project nears completion and brings together the scientists and engineers on a project to present their plans to an external review board. A CDR therefore provides a unique opportunity to witness how knowledge is exchanged and negotiated within a complex, interdisciplinary setting. The resulting ethnographic observations were analyzed and categorized into peak events. Peak events were identified when successive questions were asked pertaining to the engineering design. Focusing on these events is a useful lens to get insight about the overall knowledge system because they can represent moments where different understandings and disciplinary perspectives emerge. This paper reports on one such peak event concerning the thermal design of the satellite. We focus on one peak to provide sufficient detail so that the knowledge system and its context can be understood. Thermal design of a spacecraft is complex and dynamic with the engineer having to design for drastically different external thermal environments while balancing the changing thermal demands of internal systems. The thermal design discussion provides a particularly thorough example of a knowledge system since the engineer explained, justified, negotiated, and defended knowledge within a social setting. For example, a reviewer asked the engineer if they had taken into account what they considered to be the worst-case scenario. This required an extended discussion to negotiate the criteria by which the credibility and relevance of design components were assessed and to create a shared meaning of what “worst-case” meant. This discussion was centrally important to the technical success of the project and was unequivocally “engineering,” even though it was light on technical detail. This aspect of engineering work is focused more on the epistemic criteria by which knowledge is assessed (i.e. on the foundations of the knowledge system), rather than the technical knowledge of the design itself. Engineering students do not get much practice or instruction in explicitly negotiating knowledge systems and epistemic standards. Although this analysis is limited to a single discussion, we argue that such discussions are important in many engineering projects. Understanding how engineers communicate across different epistemic and disciplinary viewpoints is another step towards creating an engineering curriculum that more closely aligns with engineering practice. Furthermore, it shows that engineering knowledge is not only something to be possessed but instead something that must be negotiated within an interconnected and socially situated knowledge system.