Research: Invisible Gendered Experiences in Engineering Education

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

Existing research shows that a student's experience in higher education is shaped by one's gender. This has been shown to be particularly true in engineering, where some students face additional barriers to their success based on their gender. This project will investigate gender through collaborative, community-engaged research methodologies. In particular, researchers will work with undergraduate engineering students to document engineering-specific experiences. Researchers will prioritize collaboration; together with the students, they will identify strategies which foster positive educational outcomes and share these with engineering departments, faculty and administrators towards the end of advancing the success of students in engineering programs. The research project has three objectives: (i) to infuse critical theory and methodologies into engineering education research; (ii) to record, examine, and share how undergraduate engineering students of different genders find belonging and success; and (iii) to collaborate with research participants to generate recommendations toward transforming engineering programs into more inclusive and just spaces. Analysis will inform understandings of resiliency in the face of gender marginalization as well as potential subjugation linked to other intersecting identities. This project integrates critical collaborative ethnography and research justice methodologies, which centralize the principle of the research population being the foremost experts on their own experiences. Power is shifted to the subject community through involving them in knowledge production, analysis, and distribution. Three phases of research include an outreach questionnaire to identify participants and emerging themes, personal interviews, and on-site collaborative ethnographic observation. The initial outreach questionnaire will be distributed nationally through campus cultural groups and other campus communities, peer-to-peer communication, and through engineering departments. A subset (n=20) of the respondents who indicate an interest in further collaboration will be invited to participate in phenomenological interviews that will explore students' experiences of gender in engineering, and experiences with supportive structures that provoke resiliency. Five of these students will then be invited to participate in a five-day site visit. During this period, the student will collaboratively engage with the researchers in ethnographic observation of the student's campus community and support network. In addition, an online community which prioritizes confidentiality and identity protection will be created and all students who completed the initial questionnaire will be invited to join. Here, the student community and the researchers will work together to analyze data, to document community-identified sources of success and perseverance, and to develop recommendations of effective practices, policies and norms that contribute to inclusive, equitable and just learning environments. This project is of significant intellectual importance because it provides a broader contemporary framing of gender and how these identities affect the professional formation of engineers, an area that has received very little attention to-date. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.