2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

On Faculty Responsibility for Increasing Students’ Sense of Support in the Classroom: Lessons from I-MATTER about Black and Brown Students

Presented at Equity, Culture & Social Justice in Education Division (EQUITY) Technical Session 4

Teaching engineering students how to work in teams is necessary, important, and hard to do well. Minoritized students experience forms of marginalization from their teammates routinely, which affects their access to safe learning environments. Team evaluation tools like CATME can help instructors see where teaming problems are, but are often normed in ways that obscure the subtle if pervasive harassment of minoritized teammates. Instructors, particularly of large courses, need better ways to identify teams that are marginalizing minoritized team members. This paper introduces theory on microaggressions, selective incivility theory, and coded language to interpret data collected from a complex study site during the COVID-19 pandemic. The team collected data from classroom observations (moved virtual during COVID), interviews with instructors, interviews with students, interpretations of historical data collected through an online team evaluation tool called CATME, and a diary study where students documented their reflections on their marginalization by teammates. While data collection and analysis did not, of course, go as the research team had planned, it yielded insights into how frequently minoritized teammates experience marginalization, instructors’ sense of their responsibility and skill for addressing such, marginalization, and students’ sense of defeat in hoping for more equitable and supportive learning environments. The paper describes our data collection processes, analysis, and some choice insights drawn from this multi-year study at a large, research-extensive white university.

Authors

Stephanie Masta http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2413-3903 Purdue University, West Lafayette [biography]

Member of the Sault Ste Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and educational researcher focused on issues of equity in Black and Brown education in the United States.
Ms. Janelle Grant http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7225-075X University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Janelle Grant is a PhD Student in Curriculum Studies at Purdue University, Indiana, USA. Her research interests lie in the area of Black women's experiences of discipline in education. Prior to attending Purdue University, she assisted various research in
Dr. Cara Margherio University of Washington [biography]

Cara Margherio is the Manager of Qualitative Research at the SEIU 775 Benefits Group.
Dr. Darryl Dickerson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5935-4124 Florida International University [biography]

Dr. Darryl Athos Dickerson is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Florida International University. Dr. Dickersonâ€™s research agenda contains two interconnected strands: 1) systematic investigati
Dr. Matthew W. Ohland http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4052-1452 Purdue University, West Lafayette [biography]

Matthew W. Ohland is the Dale and Suzi Gallagher Professor and Associate Head of Engineering Education at Purdue University. He has degrees from Swarthmore College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Florida. His research on the longitudinal study of engineering students and forming and managing teams has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation and his team received for the best paper published in the Journal of Engineering Education in 2008, 2011, and 2019 and from the IEEE Transactions on Education in 2011 and 2015. Dr. Ohland is an ABET Program Evaluator for ASEE and represents ASEE on the Engineering Accreditation Commission. He was the 2002–2006 President of Tau Beta Pi and is a Fellow of the ASEE, IEEE, and AAAS. He was inducted into the ASEE Hall of Fame in 2023.
Dr. Alice L. Pawley http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-9117-4855 Purdue University, West Lafayette [biography]

Alice Pawley (she/hers) is a Professor in the School of Engineering Education and an affiliate faculty member in Environmental and Ecological Engineering and the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Purdue University, situated on the ancestral homelands of the Wea, Peoria, Potawatomi and Miami people, and built using resources taken from numerous other indigenous tribes and communities across the country as part of the Morrill Act. She is the winner of numerous awards, including best paper awards, leadership awards, teaching and mentoring awards, and a PECASE in 2012. She is strongly involved in Purdue’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Her research group’s diverse projects and group members are described at pawleyresearch.org. Email: apawley@purdue.edu

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