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In general, what we think of as \"diversity work\" in undergraduate engineering education focuses in the following ways: more on the overlooked assets of minority groups than on the acts of overlooking, more on the experiences of marginalized groups than on the mechanisms of marginalization by dominant groups, more on supporting and increasing minority student retention than on critiquing and remediating the systems which lead minority students to leave engineering. This dissertation presents a series of arguments which push beyond a status quo understanding of diversity in engineering education. The first approach the dissertation takes up is to problematize educational facts around failure by interrogating their roots in interactions and cultural norms in an engineering classroom. In another argument, the dissertation places the engineering classroom cultural norms of competition, whiteness, and masculinity in a critical historical context of the discipline at large. Finally, I demonstrate how engaging students in a critique of marginalizing educational culture can be an important source of agency. In addition to applying and demonstrating the value of specific novel approaches in engineering education, the dissertation contributes to the research community by discussing the respective affordances between these and other possible scholarly approaches to culture and marginalization in education. I also suggest how a consideration of the taken-for-granted culture of engineering education can be an important tool for instructors seeking to gain insight into persistent educational problems. In addition, this dissertation makes implications for diversity support practice, envisioning new forms of support programming rooted in intersectionality and critical praxis.

Research in engineering education often takes an orientation which is not anchored in a historical, political, geographical, institutional, or cultural context. Research citing pedagogical best practices are prominent, hypothetically determining the “best practice” for all populations, at all locations, and at all periods in time, past and future. Likewise, many papers focusing solely on the cognitive psychological factors (e.g. self-efficacy, motivation) affecting learning or achievement imply that the cultural norms and interactional/structural contributions to that psychology are either irrelevant or immutable. This paper takes the view that in order to make wise choices and progress as a discipline, engineering education needs to understand both its culture and its history. By becoming cognizant of and marking cultural practices, we become capable of transgressing or subverting them. By becoming aware of the historical formation of the discipline, we acknowledge the structures which have contributed to our present day culture, and we become attuned to the forces which may be continually shaping us in the present day. This paper will present a partial historical and cultural account of the formation of engineering as a discipline, its demographic makeup, its narratives and norms. This account is grounded in three engineering educational cultural norms: competition, masculinity, and whiteness. It draws on a combination of work in critical history and Science Technology and Society fields, and the author’s literature reviews of engineering education publications. While primarily relying on secondary sources, it is in the combination of the accounts, the connection to present day educational cultural settings, and the communication to a specific audience of educational stakeholders that comprises this work’s intellectual contribution. A prominent theme of the historical narrative is to suggest a reflexive relationship between the demographic representation of the discipline and its cultural normativities. This interrelationship suggests ways in which our deeply held cultural practices may be intrinsically related to our historical and ongoing demographic makeup. This problematizes prominent diversity narratives of which spotlight minority demographic identities in engineering as a novel and isolated concern. It also suggests certain cultural normativities as potential sources of demographic exclusion.

The importance of design to engineering practice and hence engineering education is widely acknowledged. In engineering programs, capstone design courses are nearly universal and freshman design experiences are becoming increasingly popular (Dally & Zhang, 1993; Dym, 1994; Froyd & Ohland, 2005; Mikic & Grasso, 2002; Pimmel, 2001; Sheppard & Jennison, 1997; Todd, Magleby, Sorensen, Swan, & Anthony, 1995; Tooley & Kevin, 1999). Supporting these efforts, engineering educators have started to explicate the nature of design thinking (Adams & Atman, 1999; Brown, 2008; Dörner, 1999; Dym, Agogino, Eris, Frey, & Leifer, 2006; Dym, Little, & Orwin, 2004; Pahl, Beitz, & Wallace, 1996; Rowe, 1991). Investigations into design thinking have looked at

This theory paper contributes to the study of smartness in engineering culture from different disciplinary perspectives. We are interested in the construct of smartness, which is a powerful, yet implicit, driver of students’ experience in engineering education. Smartness in engineering culture can be linked to both the broad narratives and norms that overarch engineering at a societal level (e.g., engineers are smart) as well as the more specific, individual beliefs that individual students hold about the nature of intelligence (e.g., fixed vs. growth mindset). However, the construct of smartness at these different levels is operationalized differently and is informed by theory from different disciplinary fields such as psychology and anthropology. Studying a complex social construct, such as smartness, from a single disciplinary frame is common; each frame has its advantages and limitations. We use this paper to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue and to motivate the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to studying smartness and its role in the culture of undergraduate engineering education. We ground our dialogue in the scholarly literature from psychology and anthropology, and leverage two co-authors’ prior work in each of these research frames respectively. From these vantage points, we discuss our own observations of the affordances and limitations of the single disciplinary perspectives. We then motivate and discuss the features of an interdisciplinary research agenda, including challenges associated with blending the assumptions and epistemologies of the two different disciplinary frames. We offer an idea of leveraging the unifying construct of beliefs as a way to facilitate interdisciplinary research on the complex construct of smartness. Theoretical implications of interdisciplinary research in this vein include new approaches to other educational constructs that span both individual mental and collective social dimensions. We note that the interdisciplinary study of smartness in engineering culture also has practical implications, such as for inclusive classroom design.

Since its inaugural conference last year, CoNECD has established an emerging community that brings the exploration of diversity and inclusion to the forefront of engineering education, particularly for hidden-but-salient identity dimensions such as sexual orientation, disability, and first generation status. As researchers, we often think about these categories as student populations to be studied and of ourselves as outside or beyond these populations. However, frameworks such as identity and intersectionality theory remind us that all educational stakeholders - including researchers - also maintain multiple identity dimensions. While researchers with normative and privileged identities typically do not have to think about the influence of their own identity dimensions on their research, they still embody and interact within these dimensions at all times. We, the two co-authors of this paper, are engineering education researchers who hold partially hidden or less-apparent identities (i.e., LGBTQ and disabled). However, these identities were transitioned into during our adult professional lives, thus prompting significant reflection about those dimensions and how they inform our work and relationship to society, broadly. As education researchers with hidden identities, we also make constant choices regarding passing and disclosure during our research activities, and often must grapple with how to maintain both transparency and safety regarding our positionality. In this dialogic paper, we each draw on our own experiences while conducting engineering education research with hidden and transitioning identities and the many dimensions of our work they impact. From this work, we draw conclusions for making education research more inclusive, for appreciating the many taken-for-granted areas of identity impacts on research, and for increasing all researchers’ awareness of their identity and positionality.

Shame provides a key mechanism of social inclusion and exclusion in engineering contexts. In order to better understand how engineering students experience shame, we used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to critically examine the individual experience of shame in the case of a high-performing, White woman who was a junior mechanical engineering major at a faith-based university (n=1). In particular, we attended to the complex relationship between personal expectations that formed the context for her shame experiences: achieving excellence in performing tasks while maintaining strong social relationships with others. We discuss the implications of this single case study on broader narratives of inclusion in the context of engineering education.

Co-curricular diversity support programs and structures have an important role in supporting underrepresented students in undergraduate engineering and STEM departments. These programs typically aim to provide a safe space and resources for a primary shared marginalized identity group, for instance, Women in Engineering programs, Minority in Engineering programs, LGBT focused programs (Out in STEM, NOGLSTP). While these programs have an important role in undergraduate engineering and have proven results for retention and academic success, they often take a similar model. Fundamental research to establish theory on the most important elements of diversity support, and to expand on existing models with new approaches, is less often pursued. This paper leverages theory and practice from outside of engineering education in order to note contrasts and imagine new possibilities for diversity support structures. First, from critical legal studies and critical race theory, the theory of intersectionality raises awareness of the multiple overlapping marginal identities, and the particular ways that oppressive social structures affect the individuals. Recent trends in intersectionality have also considered overlapping privileged/dominant and marginal identities. Intersectionality suggests a new attention to the multiple identities of a student group, rather than focusing on a single shared identity. Second, the theories of liberatory pedagogy and critical theorizing suggest that a marginalized individual engaging critically with oppressive culture is a key act of agency, and may be more empowering than other forms of help or support. As a key enactment, Intergroup dialogue is a diversity approach popular outside of STEM, but rarely explored within engineering education. Intergroup dialogue emphasizes establishing a community of trust and dialogue across difference, rather than requiring similarity for the conversation. This paper will use the three theoretical constructs to suggest key challenges within diversity support. It will conclude with possible directions for diversity support which both draw on existing structures and suggest new forms.

Background: In the past, the engineering education community has focused primarily on developing evidence-based best practices and fundamental theories of teaching and learning. An emerging focus, embodied in initiatives like the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) program, is on achieving systemic, sustainable, and scalable change, that is, the translation of theory to impact practice. Current models for engineering education units within universities have achieved goals to develop fundamental theory, making engineering education into a viable discipline. Alternative institutional models for engineering education are beginning to emerge that explore new avenues for achieving widespread, transformational impacts on educational practice . This paper describes a novel, next generation approach to translating theory to practice, and transforming an institutional culture through an integrated focus on building community and shared capacity around the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) and educational research in a college of engineering. Paper approach: When organizing a departmental or programmatic effort, logistical decisions can dominate and obscure the underlying organizing theory for the effort. Consistent with NSF’s calls for a greater understanding of theories of change, we connect the explicit and implicit organizing philosophies underpinning the innovative approach to enacted institutional plans and approaches. Guiding Theories: We draw on Henderson’s theoretical models of Institutional Change in higher education to clarify the chosen approach to transformation. We also draw on a complex systems perspective as a guiding philosophy to conceptualize change in the interconnected human, institutional, and social structures of our engineering college, and on boundary spanning to address the ways that communication across knowledge domains can be enacted and supported. Methodology: The anthropologically inspired methodology explores institutional artifacts, structure, and guiding philosophies for their explicitly stated or implicitly enacted theories. As a collaboration between insiders (founders and long time participants) and relative outsiders (a new participant), the innovative approach could be both described from experience and examined anew, and could explore both planned intentions and enacted realities. Empirical Results: Guiding principles, made explicit in PROGRAM_NAME founding documents and written reflections of organizers, include “plant a lot of seeds” and “people are the drivers of change.” An organizing structure includes administrative and faculty roles with dual focuses on developing research and translating to practice. Several opportunities for engagement between researchers and practitioners are structured as regular events and forums. Discussion: We connect the guiding theories to specific aspects of PROGRAM_NAME to clarify the purpose and implicit assumptions embedded inside institutional practices. For example, the events and forums can be understood as a form of boundary spanning, while the underlying goal of investing in people is consistent with Henderson’s “developing reflective practitioners” model for institutional change. Conclusions: We highlight PROGRAM_NAME’s approach to engineering educational transformation, substantiated by guiding theories. In so doing, we hope to provide greater insight into one approach, show contrasts with other approaches, and suggest a parallel theoretical clarification as a generative activity for other efforts at institutional change.

Purpose This study explores localized ability hierarchies in an undergraduate programming class for electrical engineers in order to deconstruct them as cultural constructions rather than “abilities” of individual students. It highlights local classroom interactional, systemic structural, and broader cultural forces which provide support for identifying ability in a local setting. Theoretical Framework Our paper draws on and adds to a small but significant body of work that connects local classroom-level interactions to broader patterns of student outcomes (Carlone, Haun-Frank, & Webb, 2011; Tonso, 2006; Esmonde, 2009). We are primarily guided by McDermott (2006) in our attempt to deconstruct engineering ability (and the lack thereof) as a cultural construction. Methodology We are studying the implementation of a novel microprocessor-based programming class for electrical engineers at a Major East Coast University. Qualitative data collection from a semester-long 30-person class included one-on-one student interviews, lecture and lab section fieldnoted observations, video of student labwork, and written work. In this paper, we foreground a prototypical student from one lab section who is effectively acquired by a deficit category of students “not cut out for engineering.” In our analysis we “turn away” (Varenne & McDermott, 1999, p. 217) from the individual struggling student to focus on the ways in which everything from classroom interactions and institutional policies to broader social patterns and cultural values, construct this student’s failure. Results At a very basic level, students’ programming background (partially) constructed their engineering ability or lack thereof. Students and instructors used programming background labels to interpret individual students’ achievement in the class. Instead of taking it for granted, we interrogate this label as a cultural construction to unlock new understandings of its power in shaping students’ experiences of the class. Contributions to this cultural construction include an economic system which values programming as an important skill for engineers, a time period wherein programming has achieved partial normativity in the educational preparation of American undergraduate students, a differentiation of programming ability amongst lines of privilege associated with socioeconomic status, race, and gender, and a set of particular students in a class on whom these differentiations have become locally inscribed. Engineering ability was also constructed via local interactions constrained by larger systemic and cultural processes. In lecture, advanced questions were affirmed and encouraged, leaving little time for more basic questions and content learning. Class participants understood who had ability and who did not based on these “performances” of ability. In lab, weeks with time-constrained individual lab-work made public which students were finishing a lab first or last. We suggest that these interactions are constrained within the broader cultural forces of product-focused (and not learning-focused) engineering education, and meritocratic university sorting procedures. Significance Our findings implicate many of the interactional mechanisms and cultural underpinnings involved with day-to-day instantiations of ability and inequity in undergraduate engineering classes. By locating the problems outside of individuals, this research intends to be a first step towards finding new operational solutions to problems of equity and access long seen as intractable and inevitable. References Carlone, H. B., Haun-Frank, J., & Webb, A. (2011). Assessing equity beyond knowledge- and skills-based outcomes: A comparative ethnography of two fourth-grade reform-based science classrooms. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 48(5), 459–485. doi:10.1002/tea.20413 Esmonde, I. (2009). Mathematics Learning in Groups: Analyzing Equity in Two Cooperative Activity Structures. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 18(2), 247–284. McDermott, R., & Varenne, H. (2006). Reconstructing culture in educational research. In Spindler, G., & Hammond, L. (Eds.) Innovations in educational ethnography: Theory, methods, and results, pp. 1-33. Tonso, K. L. (2006). Teams that work: Campus culture, engineer identity, and social interactions. Journal of Engineering Education, 95(1), 25-37.

Studies that explore the academic pathways of Black STEM undergraduates have often generalized these students’ K-12 experiences. Researchers frequently note the impact of underfunded and overburdened majority-Black schools. This structural disadvantage is a presumed cause for African Americans’ underperformance in baccalaureate STEM programs, particularly when these students are compared to their White and Asian counterparts. While this work has been important in highlighting the challenges facing majority-minority populations, with few exceptions this scholarship tends not to disaggregate Black students’ varied K-12 experiences. This can in effect amalgamate very diverse K-12 accounts into a sweeping deficit-laden narrative. Drawing on a study that employed qualitative methodologies to unpack the experiences of Black transfer students in engineering, our paper illuminates heterogeneous primary and secondary school experiences for six participants broadly classified as “Black” or “African American.” Using individual interviews and focus groups, this study explored the similarities and differences between the participants’ pre-college educational backgrounds. The findings that we describe demonstrate the ways in which some academically talented engineering undergraduates benefit from pre-college instruction in STEM courses. In addition, we present a more contextualized description of the differences between the various types of schools that Black engineering students may attend. We closely examine descriptive differences between the public school experiences of two respondents and the private school experiences of one respondent; each interviewee was educated in the U.S. Apparent differences included an emphasis on pursuing science-based degrees for a private school attendee, versus an emphasis on mathematics and mathematical competencies for undergraduates who attended American public schools. On the other hand, all Black African students in the study attended private schools in their home countries. In their interviews, they recalled fairly demanding classes, which seemed to prepare them well for their undergraduate studies. Through our literature review and qualitative research, we attempt to build a foundation for unpacking the diverse school experiences that Black children may encounter. In addition, we begin to address the literature gap concerning the lack of attention that studies have placed on understanding African students’ K-12 experiences. In this process, we reveal ways in which these challenging curricula in African countries may be enhancing students’ knowledge in STEM disciplines. Our study complements and adds nuance to many of the current literature on Black K-12 experiences. The results of this paper can inform recruitment and retention efforts that aim to support Black students in undergraduate engineering programs. For example, practitioners who oversee Minority Engineering Programs (MEPs) may be better able to provide differentiated support to students with diverse pre-college academic experiences.