Search for: All records

To understand factors that influence successful practitioner participation in meeting the course support needs of instructors, we utilized a survey to conduct an empirical analysis to model the critical success path of practitioners’ support for student development in practitioner-instructor collaborations. Our results indicated that student-related factors are significant and have a moderate influence. Also, instructor-related factors have a significant impact and large effect on student-related factors. Findings can inform the design and management of practitioners’ provision of instructors’ course support needs. These insights aid student development through practitioner-instructor collaborations. 

As a precursor to designing the ConPEC platform for stronger industry-academia collaborations, we investigated factors which instructors would consider when collaborating with practitioners to complement their pedagogical efforts. We found that instructors' considerations were influenced by students' preferences and bias, students' career and development, student learning outcomes, curriculum structure, as well as ethnic and gender diversity. Findings inform input for the design of web-based collaborative networks. Also, this study contributes to expanding literature on industry-academia collaborations for workforce development. 

Background: Dominant discourse regarding gender in engineering and engineering education relies on simplistic notions of gender as a rigid binary, which obscures the existence of transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people and the gender dynamics they experience. Purpose: This paper seeks to address the limits of the dominant gender discourse and research paradigm and propose new paths forward. This article calls researchers to intentionally transform their approach and framing of gender to create gender equity for all. Scope: An examination of existing literature in engineering education is put against prevailing theories of gender and human difference from across academia. The overwhelming majority of literature in the field exists within a reductive gender binary. TGNC students and professionals are largely invisible in engineering education research and theory and this exclusion causes harm to individuals as well as our community as a whole. Such exclusion is not limited to engineering contexts but is found to be a central component of systemic TGNC marginalization in higher education and in the United States. Discussion: We call for a substantive disciplinary shift towards studying the deep complexity of gender informed by, and accountable to, literature on gender theory, queer studies, and feminist research methodology. We propose interventions for engineering education researchers categorized into three levels: 1) Micro— to recognize gender diversity in engineering education; 2) Meso—to describe and analyze the experiences of TGNC students in research; and 3) Macro—to transform our discipline’s conceptualization and theoretical framing of gender.