2024 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD)

Engineering identity and its subcomponent, recognition, is a highly researched topic within engineering education. Numerous studies have shown that recognition is connected to increased student retention and an engineering student’s sense of belonging (Hatmaker, 2013; Rover, 2008). Additionally, recognition is an invaluable research topic because of its connection to understanding how students form relationships within engineering, its ability to verify the other two components of engineering identity: competency and performance, and more importantly, its ability to parse the experience of underrepresented and marginalized students in STEM (Carlone & Johnson, 2007; Rodriquez et al., 2017; Rohde et al., 2019).

However, most of the research regarding recognition has been limited to quantitative studies that have used survey assessments to measure how much students recognize themselves as engineers and how much a limited selection of people in their lives (family, friends, peers, and instructors) recognize them as engineers (Cribbs et al., 2015; Godwin, 2016; Kendall et al., 2019; Prybutok et al., 2016). Though these studies have made invaluable contributions, these studies have not explored student’s lived experiences of recognition, they have ignored the social and cultural contexts that impact recognition, and perhaps more importantly, missed an opportunity to identify and understand the opposite of recognition: misrecognition and its consequences upon marginalized communities in engineering education.

This paper discusses our findings from a qualitative study that interviewed fifteen biomedical engineering (BME) undergraduate students that identified as female and of Black ethnicity. Though previous studies measured students’ engineering self-perception and their perceptions of a limited few close to them, this study uncovered valuable findings regarding the student’s experience of recognition and misrecognition. First, this study highlights the missing discussion regarding misrecognition when discussing recognition. This leads to the second topic of how the recognition experiences of students of color are replete with misrecognition and a lack of recognition, especially within the classroom. Finally, this paper provides a framework and language to identify and understand these experiences of misrecognition within engineering education among students of color.