2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Surveying the Cultural Assets of Engineering Students: An Exploratory Quantitative Study

Presented at Promoting Social Sustainability, Cultural Assets, and Assessing Equity and Diversity Index

The cultural assets that engineering learners use to meet coursework demands and navigate engineering programs can be invisible to engineering educators. To examine these cultural assets of engineering learners, a quantitative instrument was designed using Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) as a theoretical lens. It was distributed as part of a tri-campus study. CCW theory delineates six forms of cultural capital that reflect the assets and resources people accumulate through their ways of living. These forms include aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant capitals. An 18-item survey was designed to connect engineering students’ cultural assets to the ways they navigate their present-day lives as college students and foresee their future lives as engineers. The study recruited a sample of undergraduate students registered in engineering majors at three institutions of higher education including a public Hispanic Serving Institution, a Tier-2 research institution, and a Tier-1 research institution. The survey findings corroborate results found in other studies. Although our study is limited by a sample size of just seventy-five students from three different engineering schools, the findings show two key results that we present in this paper. First, Students of Color scored higher than White Students on a combined index of survey items measuring the six forms of cultural capital. Second, we discuss how Students of Color, who are more likely to be First-Generation students, use their cultural assets in unique ways. We discuss the important implications of these findings for the development and implementation of engineering instructional practices and curricula.

Authors

Collette Patricia Higgins Tufts University
Emily Joanna Kamp
Dr. Kenneth Stewart [biography]

Dr. Kenneth L. Stewart is retired professor of sociology at Angelo State University where he served on the faculty from 1975 through 2018. He was also among the founding faculty members of the Master of Public Health Degree at Texas Tech University Health
Dr. Azadeh Bolhari, P.E. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6289-7771 University of Colorado, Boulder [biography]

Dr. Bolhari is a professor of environmental engineering in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (CEAE) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her teaching focuses on fate and transport of contaminants, capstone design and aqueous chemistry. Dr. Bolhari is passionate about broadening participation in engineering through community-based participatory action research. Her research interests explore the boundaries of engineering and social science to understand evolution of resilience capacity at family and community level to sustainable practices utilizing quantitative and qualitative research methods.
Dr. Daniel Ivan Castaneda http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-8529-3815 James Madison University [biography]

Daniel I. Castaneda is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering at James Madison University. Daniel earned his PhD in 2016 and his Master's in 2010, both in civil engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He previously earned his Bachelor's in 2008 from the University of California, Berkeley. His course development includes civil engineering materials, dynamics, engineering design, engineering economics, first-year engineering experience, matrix analysis, mechanics, probability and risk in engineering, statics, and structural analysis. His research aims to better society by exploring how infrastructure materials can be made to be more environmentally sustainable and resilient; and by exploring how engineering can be structured to be more welcoming of diverse perspectives, which can fuel solutions in challenging societal inequities.

Download paper (1.15 MB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session

For those interested in:

1st Generation
Broadening Participation in Engineering and Engineering Technology
engineering
gender
race/ethnicity
undergraduate