2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

There is limited research exploring the lived experiences of Black engineering Ph.D. students. Our proposed work employs an arts-based inquiry and transforms the interview data into a script for potential ethno-theater performance. We constructed stories of three students’ journeys as they navigated engineering PhD programs at prestigious, predominantly White institutions (PWI) through creative resilience. Ethno-drama joins the words ethnography and drama to describe a written play script derived from significant selections of narratives collected from interview transcripts (Saldana, 2005). Grounded in Critical Race and Role Strain Theories, this script represents counter-narratives of the Black experience in higher education in STEM. The emergent script captures the masks and identities worn by Black students. This work aims to show the death of 1000 cuts and the myriad ways Black students experience marginalization in engineering. To present the marginalization mask, we use the composite narrative approach. In this, we will read story 1 (Adrian), story 2 (Maya), and story 3 (Naomi) to collectively represent these “deaths of 1000 cuts” experiences. This will be recorded as one story/voice; although it represents the varied manifestations of marginalizing experiences that Black students have encountered in engineering, we also refer to the marginalization mask as a spirit murdering mask. Spirit murdering was originally conceptualized by Williams (1987) and applied to education by Love (2016); it is a form of racism that inflicts pain and kills the humanity and spirits of people of color. Microaggression, role negotiation, hypervisibility vs invisibility, lack of direction, mental health, and other marginalized experiences that Black students navigate in academia are a reflection of our society; hence it's critical that academic work reaches beyond the traditional venues. Also, the development of scripts calls for reconsidering current pedagogical practices and policies in academia, as the audience will witness the enactment of some experiences.
We would like to advance our discussions in the following directions to further enhance the methodological contributions of ethno-drama in the context of engineering education-
• How do you decide what is most impactful to include from your qualitative data set when the experiences are all critical, varied, and differentially impacted by intersectional identities?
• Are there other effective ways of moving from narrative to script, specifically in dealing with data from people that have marginalized identities?
• The dilemma- when you represent the narratives of the people with who you do not have shared identity (race), however, there are some common identities (marginalization in higher education, gender)-what are the most effective ways?