2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering in the United States has grappled with the limitations of being a predominantly “pale and male” discipline for many decades (Wulf, 1998), despite overwhelming calls to diversify the field and broaden participation from the federal government, the National Academies, educational institutions, and individual citizens. Counterspaces, or “safe spaces” for marginalized individuals to be able to express themselves freely and challenge dominant narratives have been understood to be important in maintaining a positive self-concept for anyone outside of the mainstream of STEM education (Ong et al., 2018), or on the periphery of campus cultures (Keels, 2020).
Redshirt programs are one example of this type of asset-based student support program aimed at broadening participation in engineering for students from minoritized racial or ethnic backgrounds or from under-resourced high schools and geographic regions (Myers et al., 2018). Redshirt programs provide a performance enhancing first year and an alternative admissions pathway for students who do not meet traditional admissions criteria for highly selective engineering colleges, but still have the desire and potential to be an engineer. Since the founding of the first Redshirt program in 2009, the model has now expanded to six institutions mainly in the Midwest and West to improve the success of engineering students from low-income backgrounds, minoritized within the institutions these programs are embedded in (Knaphus-Soran et al., 2018).
The present investigation looks into the impact of RedShirt programs on the development of engineering identity as RedShirt students transition into their middle years and encounter major specific classes all while navigating a global pandemic. As these students are underrepresented in engineering and feature students from non-traditional engineering backgrounds, understanding the challenges faced by RedShirt students, the resiliency of RedShirt communities during the pandemic and the impact of these experiences is helpful for engineering educators. Deeper understanding of these experiences is useful for educators looking to support all kinds of students through dramatic shifts in learning environments and modalities. Our data focuses specifically on students in their second and third years of engineering undergraduate, as they have persisted through the performance-enhancing, high-touch first-year of RedShirt curricula to join the mainstream curricular flows of their chosen engineering majors and disciplines. Our research questions are:
What are characteristics of physical and virtual counterspaces, which enable RedShirt students to develop engineering identities?
How are spaces utilized by RedShirt students to form connections and identities in engineering?
How have the spaces in which engineering students live, study, work, socialize, and exist within changed during the COVID-19 pandemic and after returning to in-person learning?
Focus group data were collected from three universities associated with the RedShirt Consortium, one located in the Rocky Mountain Region and two from the west coast both in the United States. Thirteen students participated in the focus groups across the three sites. Focus groups were run twice about four weeks apart for each of the three groups. The first focus group collected general data about students’ experiences in school during the pandemic while the second focus group employed a photo elicitation methodology. Participants were instructed to take (or find) at least 3 images a week for 3 weeks, one of each of the following each week: (1) environments which make them feel like an engineer; (2) environments which make them feel like they belong; (3) environments which make them feel out of place. Follow-up interviews asked the participants to explain the images they chose, to describe what they were thinking and feeling when choosing those images, how the images are the same or different across the three weeks, and anything else they would like to add. Data were collected and transcribed and analyzed individually and in group settings by the researchers. Results revealed themes in the data related to each of the research questions which will be discussed in the paper.

References:
Keels, M. (2020). Campus Counterspaces: Black and Latinx Students’ Search for Community at Historically White Universities. Cornell University Press.
Knaphus-Soran, E., Delaney, A., Tetrick, K. C., Cunningham, S., Cosman, P., Ennis, T. D., Myers, B. A., Milford, J., Llewellyn, D. C., Riskin, E. A., Callahan, J., Pitts, K., & Ferrez, M. (2018, June 23). Work in Progress: Institutional Context and the Implementation of the Redshirt in Engineering Model at Six Universities. 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition. https://peer.asee.org/work-in-progress-institutional-context-and-the-implementation-of-the-redshirt-in-engineering-model-at-six-universities
Myers, B. A., Knaphus-Soran, E., Llewellyn, D. C., Delaney, A., Cunningham, S., Cosman, P., Ennis, T. D., Tetrick, K. C., Riskin, E. A., Callahan, J., & Pitts, K. (2018, April 29). Redshirt in Engineering: A Model for Improving Equity and Inclusion. 2018 CoNECD - The Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity Conference. https://peer.asee.org/redshirt-in-engineering-a-model-for-improving-equity-and-inclusion
Ong, M., Smith, J. M., & Ko, L. T. (2018). Counterspaces for women of color in STEM higher education: Marginal and central spaces for persistence and success. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 55(2), 206–245. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21417
Wulf, W. A. (1998, Winter). Diversity in Engineering. The Bridge, National Academy of Engineering, 28(4). https://nae.edu/19582/Bridge/CompetitiveMaterialsandSolutions/DiversityinEngineering.aspx