2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Humans are a story-understanding species that share knowledge, teach, and relate much of what our culture has learned via metaphors and narratives. Even our own identity in the world can be thought of as a narrative in our minds, and defining our future selves needs to fit that narrative. It is this power of story that we believe needs to be fundamentally embraced by diversity efforts in engineering and computing to make a significant change in our demographic challenges. And yet, the power of story is left, mostly, unexplored in engineering as it does not fit with our STEM-focused fields that sit strongly in the camps of quantitative evidence, testing, and design.

We will argue in this paper, that there is convincing evidence that leveraging the power of story might be the ``holy grail'' for changing the composition of engineers and computing specialists to a more diverse and welcoming culture.

In particular, we will look at three story-related research topics that we believe should be examined carefully and employed in our Colleges and Universities to make this important change. First, we describe how our own narratives define who we are, and how role models provide us with ways of imagining our future narratives. These role models, therefore, if not curated properly do not allow us to imagine our own narratives fitting well. Second, we look to Baxter Magolda's model of self-knowing and self-authorship to begin to understand the deeper meaning of our stories and how we learn. Third, we look to the metaphor of the Hero's/Heroine's journey as related to us by Campbell as a story-driven metaphor that can help us design and relate to college learning.

In our philosophical discussion of these three story-driven ideas, we will provide some practical implementations of these concepts, that we believe would be interesting interventions to test in our Universities and Colleges. The overall goal is to change or enlighten society with the real stories of engineering and computing such that we can all imagine ourselves pursuing such interesting paths.