2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

An alarmingly small number of students displaced by civil conflict, natural disasters, and other stimuli of forced migration attend college or university (i.e. only 5% of refugees compared to the 41% global average), and an even smaller number are taught high-value skills in STEM and engineering due to low levels of funding and the devaluing of displaced peoples’ dignity (UNHCR Tertiary Education, 2022). Though most research is at the primary and secondary level, there is some prior scholarship at the tertiary level that suggests, for those affected by displacement who do make it into STEM education, becoming a professional in this space is acutely challenging. This is because when a student’s ability to place-make is stripped away through forced migration, they have to shape their professional identities amongst new local politics, social structures, and demographics that are often discriminatory in nature and unrelatable to domestic peers (Felix, 2020). This experience of resettlement’s impact on professional identity development is only compounded by students’ experience of the culture of engineering, dominated by the white male elite and hardness (at least in the US); here, the technical is separated from the social, and there is a lack of focus on professional development (Cech, 2013), making displaced engineering students’ experiences of professional identity development qualitatively different from their non-engineering peers.
There is a breadth of literature on engineering professional identity development for traditional students, but for those affected by displacement, there is less research, so professional identity development as a form of assessment is often left unaddressed for displaced engineering students despite the notion that a positively-formed sense of identity enables retention and a sense of belonging in engineering. In response, this study investigates current research on the influences on professional identity development for displaced college students across contexts and disciplines, and it synthesizes findings in a systematic literature review. This effort extends previous inquiry because it avoids the tendency of research to be site-specific, ignoring the uniqueness of displacement and disciplinary scenarios (Webb & Paretti, 2022), and it also highlights critical ways in which a STEM learning environment might exacerbate experiences displaced students face as they develop professionally.
This systematic literature review is grounded in social cognitive career theory (Lent et al., 1994) and stems from a basis of 59 articles passing different quality screens. Works span different experiences of displaced students including but not limited to refugees, asylum-seekers, DACA recipients, student migrants, other undocumented students, disaster victims, and internally displaced persons. Findings suggest that issues of identity invisibility, pressure, othering through discourse, liminality, credentialism, figured worlds, cultural conflict, instability, and limited resources influence displaced engineering students’ professional identity development and highlight the need for more engineering-specific studies of student experiences.