Empowering Engineering Scholar-Activists through Community-driven Research Experiences

Despite efforts to advance diversity and inclusion resources on college campuses, engineering culture remains a chilly climate for students with marginalized identities. While prior studies have focused on investigating the experience of engineering students from underrepresented populations, they largely ignore students at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities and they often lack significant action to help create more inclusive environments.

This project will take the next step to move beyond merely describing the experiences of marginalized engineering students. The ultimate goal of this work will be to change engineering culture by growing a collaborative, student-driven research community of underrepresented engineering students and allies. This community of scholar-activists will employ their scholarship on marginalized engineering student populations to advocate for personal and institutional change.

Students will read and discuss relevant engineering education and sociology literature, reflect on their own experiences and actions, engage with activists across campus, conduct their own research on engineers from marginalized groups, and lead future community outreach and organization efforts. This project aligns with the Broadening Participation in Engineering (BPE) program to enhance the diversity and inclusion of underrepresented groups in engineering, particularly in its innovative approach to creating inclusive research communities that will improve retention of students from underrepresented groups and that can be replicated in other contexts.

In the pursuit to develop scholar-activists among students historically marginalized in engineering, this project will engage students in a vibrant research community where they are supported in pursuing their own undergraduate and graduate research projects for and about broadening participation in engineering. Key components of the project will include a research group that provides constructive feedback and support of student-initiated qualitative research, a network of faculty and graduate researcher mentors, journal clubs with an open invitation for marginalized students and allies to read and discuss the literature on BPE, and opportunities for all engineering faculty to learn inclusive practices.

Our theoretical stance will follow the tenets of critical theory: (1) We will center the voices of the students in the research by engaging them as researchers. (2) We will value lived experience as an important qualification for doing this research. (3) We will empower the students leading the research, which will strengthen their social identities and potentially their activist identities. (4) We will integrate research and action and are prepared to deal with the inherent contradictions. To enact this critical approach and develop scholar-activists, we will use resistance and social justice literature from within and beyond engineering education.

The overall model of creating a student-centered research community around marginalized engineers is potentially transformative and has potential for adoption at other institutions and for other engineering student populations. This project will train marginalized engineering students to build community wherever they go next. Additionally, this project is likely to improve climate and retention by creating additional (and increasing visibility of) safe spaces for marginalized engineering students.

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.