2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This is a research paper. Students in introductory engineering courses face challenges communicating and integrating their ideas in team projects. When teamwork is gendered, women students can experience marginalization. Because of frequently lacking a stake in the discourse, women students become isolated, especially in situations where technical expertise is valued (Beddoes & Panther, 2017). While these issues can, and have been, attributed to gendered discourse and ideological roles, this research seeks to identify concrete ways in which educators might intervene to create more inclusive learning environments.

This research integrates frameworks from the domains of engineering education and technical and professional communication. Researchers in engineering education have evaluated the ways in which the curriculum can be altered to be more inclusive (Dewsbury, 2019), and assessed the outcomes of having diverse teams in the classroom (Oti et al., 2022). In technical and professional communication, researchers have developed taxonomies for understanding communication infrastructure (Adams, 2022) and found that inclusion is not only practiced by people and society, but in the methods that classrooms are conducted and tangibly constructed. However, there is still a need for further research on the social construct of STEM fields and how they have notably become male dominated. To that end, our study seeks to gain firsthand insight from female and gender diverse students and faculty members regarding their experiences in academia. Participants share perspectives and pieces of advice on how we can adjust course curriculum and methodology to establish a more inclusive setting within the introductory engineering courses at the university. This qualitative study seeks to answer: (1) What types of marginalization do women students experience while communicating their work in introductory engineering courses? (2) What strategies do they currently use to circumvent that marginalization?, and (3) What strategies might instructors implement to assist women students in circumventing these moments more effectively?

Grounded in an intersectional feminist theoretical orientation (Crenshaw, 1989), we conducted semi-structured interviews with a critical incident data collection method. After interviewing students and faculty about a time when students had a breakdown in communication and gaining the perspective of the students and faculty, we transcribe and code the interviews using in vivo, emotion, and axial coding. This analysis reveals how female and gender diverse students experience marginalization and faculty perceptions of these classroom experiences. This study provides insight into how institutions can enhance classroom interaction to benefit diverse groups. More specifically, this research offers the opportunity for expansion and inclusion within STEM fields, starting from the roots, at the instructional level at universities.

Keywords: rhetorical infrastructure, gender equity, communication and teamwork