2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 281: Examining Scripts of Whiteness in Engineering Education

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

Funded by the NSF Racial Equity in STEM Education Program, this project aims to deeply interrogate the influence and pervasiveness of Whiteness in engineering culture. While there has been substantial research into the masculinity of engineering, Whiteness has received far less attention. We claim the centrality of Whiteness in engineering curricula informs the culture, climate, and discourse of engineering education, leading to an exclusionary culture within engineering as reflected by the lack of diversity and lower retention of students and faculty of color, and contributes to systemic barriers negatively impacting racial equity. Moving towards racial equity in engineering education requires a fundamental shift in thinking in two important ways: 1) we must reframe how we think about underserved populations from "minority" to "minoritized by a dominant discourse", and 2) to begin to dismantle the impacts of Whiteness, we must first make this barrier visible. The paper will expand on these concepts.

In the first year of this project, the PIs have begun to explore scripts of Whiteness in engineering education by conducting a collaborative autoethnography through documenting and analyzing their own experiences facing, enacting and challenging scripts of Whiteness in engineering spaces. The PIs each contribute diverse perspectives of engineering education through lenses of race, gender, and age/rank, among other social identity categories. A collaborative autoethnography (CAE) takes a collaborative approach to the process of critical self reflection and can be conducted in many forms, such as such as collecting personal memory data (e.g., journaling), interviewing each other, facilitating intentional dialogue, or observing each other (e.g., in the classroom). CAE is not a linear process, but requires an ongoing dialogue (conversations, negotiations, or even arguments) between researcher team members over a long period of time (at least months, if not years). Here our diverse viewpoints and years-long experience working together will facilitate rich conversations that let us interrogate the ways in which Whiteness reveals its form differently depending on one’s positionality. In the later years of the project, we will create a faculty development program intended to help engineering faculty develop their critical consciousness and begin to decenter Whiteness from their ways of thinking and discourses (i.e., beliefs, attitudes, value systems, actions, etc.) so they can begin to critically think about promoting and enacting practices that move engineering education toward racial equity. Although the pathway to critical consciousness is not linear, it is a one-way street; once faculty begin to see the systemic barriers (such as those created by scripts of Whiteness) around them, there is no going back. In the long term, we hope to lay the groundwork for recognizing, interrogating, and eventually dismantling forces of systemic oppression in engineering higher education.

Authors

Dr. Diana A. Chen http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-3616-1538 University of San Diego [biography]

Diana A. Chen, PhD is an Associate Professor and one of the founding faculty members of Integrated Engineering at the University of San Diego. In collaboration with colleagues, Dr. Chen is designing a new engineering curriculum to educate changemakers who understand that engineering is an inherently socio-technical activity. Her passion is studying and encouraging culture change in engineering curricula and spaces to shift engineering to be a field more inclusive of diversity in all forms. Her scholarly interests include engineering education that contextualizes engineering sciences and design, exploring engineering boundaries for inclusive pedagogy, and sustainability and bio-inspired design in the built environment. She earned her BS in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, and MS and PhD in Civil Engineering from Clemson University.
Prof. Gordon D Hoople http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2663-4664 University of San Diego [biography]

Dr. Gordon D. Hoople is an assistant professor and one of the founding faculty members of integrated engineering at the University of San Diego. He is passionate about creating engaging experiences for his students. His work is primarily focused on two ar
Dr. Joel Alejandro Mejia http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3908-9930 The University of Texas, San Antonio [biography]

Dr. Joel Alejandro (Alex) Mejia is an Associate Professor with joint appointment in the Department of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering and the Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies at The University of Texas at San Antonio. His research has contributed to the integration of critical theoretical frameworks in engineering education to investigate deficit ideologies and their impact on minoritized communities. His work seeks to analyze and describe the assets, tensions, contradictions, and cultural collisions many Latino/a/x students experience in engineering through testimonios. He is particularly interested in approaches that contribute to a more expansive understanding of engineering in sociocultural contexts, the impact of critical consciousness in engineering practice, and the development and implementation of culturally responsive pedagogies in engineering education.
Dr. Susan M Lord http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2675-5626 University of San Diego [biography]

Susan Lord is Professor and Chair of Integrated Engineering at the University of San Diego. She received a BS from Cornell University in Materials Science and Electrical Engineering (EE) and MS and PhD in EE from Stanford University. Her research focuses on the study and promotion of equity in engineering including student pathways and inclusive teaching. She has won best paper awards from the Journal of Engineering Education, IEEE Transactions on Education, and Education Sciences. Dr. Lord is a Fellow of the IEEE and ASEE and received the 2018 IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award. She is a coauthor of The Borderlands of Education: Latinas in Engineering. She is a co-Director of the National Effective Teaching Institute (NETI).

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