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In this workshop, we introduced participants to the tacit and often hidden skills of doing interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to understand lived experience in engineering education. With the growth of IPA research in engineering education, this workshop was designed to sharpen the skills of participants who come with experience in qualitative research and provide practical guidance to participants who may be novices to qualitative research. The workshop was characterized by an interactive style, in which participants collectively analyze a transcript excerpt from an interview with an engineering student regarding their experience of shame. To strengthen the translation of the workshop, the session was intentionally facilitated by both an expert in conducting IPA research and a highly trained engineer who is at the beginning stages of doing IPA.

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.

This paper summarizes the current status of our NSF CAREER investigation of engineering faculty members’ experiences of professional shame. In the first year of this project, we used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to examine the emotional experience among individual faculty members in engineering programs. Our objectives are anchored in our overarching goal to understand the connections between the emotion regulation of engineering faculty and the academic cultures that embed them. This paper focuses on the work that has been completed in the first year of this project examining the individual experiences of engineering faculty with professional shame. We report on general patterns from the early stages of our analysis of interview transcripts with four engineering faculty members (n = 14). We discuss how our IPA work informs the next steps of our overarching investigation, and briefly discuss the broader significance related to the context of faculty wellbeing within engineering education.

Prior research on faculty-student interactions in engineering education generally conceptualizes the function of these episodes to be supportive of professional development. In this paper, we examine the experience of professional shame amid faculty-student interactions. More generally, we examine the emotional significance of interactions between faculty and students and how such moments can affect how students cope with the experience of professional shame. Our findings are based on a thematic analysis that followed a broader qualitative mixed-method investigation of how engineering students experience professional shame. Specifically, we analyzed specific episodes of moments where the experience of shame was connected to faculty members within focus group transcripts (n = 10) of engineering students (n = 38) and interview transcripts with engineering students (n = 16). We generated three themes that characterized the experience of professional shame amid faculty-student interactions. First, faculty would engender shame through conveying vague, holistic expectations of what it means to be an engineer. Second, students would cope with the experience of shame by blaming the faculty member for the experience. Finally, some students saw the faculty member as a source of hope while they experienced professional shame. These findings point to the crucial role that faculty play inmore »not only preparing engineering students for professional practice but also for cultivating environments of well-being within engineering programs.« less

BACKGROUND Previous work has identified the reality of structural constraints placed on engineering students from underrepresented gender, racial, or ethnic backgrounds, a process known as minoritization. Students from minoritized and marginalized backgrounds are often expected to overcome additional obstacles in order to be successful in engineering or to claim identity as an engineer. Such a cultural backdrop contributes to the experience of professional shame, which has not yet been characterized in the lived experiences of engineering students who identify with minoritized backgrounds. PURPOSE We contend that professional shame is a major factor in both creating and perpetuating cycles of marginalization that inhibit students from forming a professional identity as an engineer or succeeding in their academic program. Anchored in theoretical foundations of psychology and sociology, we define professional shame as a painful emotional experience that occurs when individuals perceive themselves to be wholly inadequate in relation to identity-relevant standards within a professional domain. In this paper, we examine the lived experiences of professional shame in undergraduate engineering students in the United States who identify with racial, gender, or ethnic backgrounds that are minoritized within the structural constraints of their engineering programs. METHODS To answer our research question: How do studentsmore »from minoritized gender, racial or ethnic backgrounds experience professional shame within the context of engineering education? We conducted an interpretative methodological analysis (IPA). Specifically, we conducted semi-structured interviews with junior engineering majors (n = 7) from two predominantly white institutions (PWIs) who self-identified as being from a minoritized gender, racial, or ethnic background. We found IPA to be especially effective in answering our research question while affirming the nuances of the diversity found in our participants’ gender, racial and ethnic backgrounds. We carefully analyzed the interview transcripts, generating descriptive, linguistic, and contextual comments. These comments informed multiple emergent themes for each participant, which were subsequently integrated into robust themes that characterized the psychological experiences shared by all participants. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS Our findings are summarized in four robust, psychological themes. First, minoritized identities were salient in moments of professional shame. Second, in response to professional shame, students sought out confirmation of belonging within the engineering space. Third, their perception of engineering as an exceptionally difficult major that required exceptional smartness intensified the shame experience. And, finally, participants experienced a tension between wanting to adhere to engineering stereotypes and wanting to diverge from or alter engineering stereotypes. SIGNIFICANCE AND IMPLICATIONS Through examining participants’ experiences of shame and subsequent struggle to belong and claim identity as an engineer, we seek to address efforts in bolstering diversity, equity, and inclusion that may be hindered by the permeation of professional shame in the experience of minoritized students. We see these findings as critical in giving insight on how minoritization occurs and so that equity can become a systemic objective for everyone in the engineering community rather than the burden only on the shoulders of those who are marginalized by the community.« less