CAREER: Support our Troops: Re-storying student veteran and service member deficit in engineering through professional formation and community engagement

The persistent scarcity of U.S. engineers from underrepresented groups, including women, racial and ethnic minorities, and persons with disabilities, complicates the nation’s ability to tackle 21st-century engineering challenges and lead innovation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) globally. Our nation’s military veterans and service members deeply reflect these groups and represent a robust and diverse community of highly trained and skilled residents who, through their military affiliation, possess substantial opportunities for education-related financial support.

Despite their strong and tangible potential for strengthening and diversifying the engineering workforce, military-connected students remain overlooked and understudied in higher education research, generally, and engineering education research, specifically. Focused on the development of U.S. military veterans and service members as engineers, this project will support the National Science Foundation (NSF) Professional Formation of Engineers program and contribute to NSF’s efforts to broaden participation in engineering, promote re-entry of women and women veterans into the STEM workforce, and provide alternative pathways for veterans into STEM-related industries.

This project will advance NSF program goals by generating new knowledge about how student veterans and service members experience engineering education and by producing innovative and inclusive programs, web-based resources, and trainings aimed at improving the participation and persistence of military-connected students in engineering education.

The objectives of this CAREER project are to 1) characterize the community cultural wealth of student veterans and service members (SVSM) and critique the educational structures impacting their participation and persistence in engineering, 2) construct a SVSM identity model, and 3) conduct an asset campaign to cultivate broad awareness of SVSM community cultural wealth, infuse asset-based counter narratives into dominant educational discourses of deficit and deviance about military veterans, and dismantle structural inequities that inhibit the participation, persistence, and professional formation of military-connected students in engineering. The project will enable a theoretically rich, contextualized, and longitudinal qualitative research plan to tell, share, and examine narratives of experience with diverse, military-connected undergraduates over a five-year project period.

The project will engage military-connected undergraduates enrolled in engineering programs across five public universities and community colleges, two of which are emerging Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). Using a relational ontology and viewing narratives of experience that are situated in time, place, and social milieus as research phenomenon and research method, the project will be guided by two research questions:

1) How do SVSM participate and persist in undergraduate engineering education? 2) How do SVSM produce engineering identities during their undergraduate engineering education?

This project will address critical gaps in the research literature about asset-based frameworks and targeted professional identity development supports for SVSM in engineering. Project outcomes are transformative in that they will 1) add to and refine an emerging Veteran Critical Theory through in-depth accounts of the community cultural wealth of military-connected students and provide counternarratives that redress current discourses of veteran deficit and deviance in education, 2) add to current theoretical understandings of the professional formation of engineers by proposing a model of student veteran and service member engineering identity development, and 3) advocate for military-connected students across key support communities at five partner institutions and nationally online.

Sustained project impact will occur through the broad dissemination of tested educational resources, including accessible military-connected student peer ally and professional mentorship programs and sensitivity- and awareness-trainings and online resources for engineering administrators, faculty and staff.

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.