2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background

Identity in engineering has been a topic of choice in engineering education research over the past decade. Identity is often used to explain student interest, retention and belonging in engineering. Most research studying identity however only focus on a small part of student identity (typically race and gender), often categorizing students using pre-defined demographic categories. This categorization omits the intersectional nature of identity, which defines identity as the cumulation and interaction of one’s various identities. Studying this intersectionality could provide better insights into understanding engineering student’s identity and experiences as engineers.

Purpose:

This phenomenographic study aims to gain further understanding of the qualitative ways in which underrepresented engineering students and practicing engineers experience identity within their fields. By following one engineering student and one practicing engineer, we aim to further understand the similarities and differences in identity development associated with these two settings. Focusing on one’s experience navigating intersecting identities would provide valuable information about the broader implication and importance of identity in engineering.

Design/Method:

This study follows a phenomenographic qualitative design. Two participants shared their experiences during three rounds of semi-structured interviews. As prescribed by phenomenographic methodology, our participant’s interviews were analyzed by focusing on the participant’s perspective of a phenomenon (being an engineer). The various ways of experiencing this phenomenon were identified and compared between our two settings (engineering higher education and practice). This process was repeated after each set of interviews, allowing us to get an in depth understanding of our participants’ world views.

Results

Participants shared insights about the relations between various aspect of their identities and their experiences within the engineering field. Intersectionality proved to be an important aspect of the participant’s worldview as the navigation between various social settings implied suppressing or expressing one or more of their identities. Conflicting identities also had an important impact on the participant’s experience in engineering.

Conclusions

This study helped gain a better understanding of the nuanced ways of experiencing identities in engineering, in both contexts of engineering higher education and practice.
Through their description of expressing various identities within a single setting, the experiences shared by our participants highlighted the importance of considering intersectionality when studying identity and belonging.