2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this full research paper is to explore how undergraduate engineering students experience the recognition of their engineering identities by engineering faculty.

How undergraduate engineering students believe others see or recognize them as engineering people influences how they take on a disciplinary role identity. Despite the importance of students’ recognition beliefs, less is known about what the recognition of engineering identities looks like in engineering spaces. To design pedagogy and practices that include opportunities for students to be recognized as engineers, we need a nuanced understanding of how these experiences are perceived by students. The role of engineering faculty in recognizing students is particularly noteworthy as they frequently interact with students and often facilitate access to further opportunities within and outside academia. This work specifically examined students’ perceptions of faculty as sources or recognition and their interpretations of this recognition.

This paper focuses on the qualitative results of an ongoing multi-method project at a large, western, land grant university. This phenomenologically guided study explores the experiences of a cohort of 30 high-achieving, socioeconomically disadvantaged students from varying gender, racial, ethnic, and educational backgrounds as they navigate a traditional undergraduate engineering program. This study includes data from 6 rounds of focus groups held at the end of each semester for participants’ first three years in an undergraduate engineering program. In these focus groups questions prompted participants to share and reflect on their motivation, identity, success, and cohort involvement. This paper focuses on data from questions that prompted students to reflect on who saw them as engineers, how they knew, and how they valued this recognition. Directed content and thematic analysis were used to identify codes and develop themes in relation to participants’ recognition beliefs from various groups of people, including faculty. These themes were used to identify what recognition from faculty may look like and how it is interpreted as valuable or meaningful to engineering undergraduate students.

Results indicated that participants qualified faculty as potential sources of meaningful recognition whose treated students as in-progress with varying degrees or respect depending if they were teaching or mentorship faculty. These findings help clarify how undergraduate engineering students qualify sources of recognition and extend identity work by exploring what meaningful recognition can look like in the undergraduate engineering context. By better understanding how students qualify recognition sources and perceive recognition as meaningful, we can design educational environments and high-impact practices that support engineering identity development.