2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Purpose: Identifying the inequities underrepresented groups face in undergraduate engineering education and addressing these inequities is commonly in the hands of faculty and staff rather than the students who experience them firsthand. Seeking to shift away from this dynamic and empower students to name and challenge the oppression they face, we launched the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Ambassador Program at a large Hispanic-Serving Institution in the Southeastern United States. JEDI is a co-curricular program that employs undergraduate engineering students to engage in justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion projects with the guidance of a graduate student or university support staff mentor. In this paper, we investigate the impact and limitations of this attempt at liberatory pedagogy through analyzing exit interviews with the alumni from the first two years of the program.

Framework: This study is informed by liberative pedagogy, which facilitates critical consciousness and supports students in bringing their whole selves to a learning space to expand their critical capacities. One of the primary goals in creating JEDI was to provide engineering students space to realize and name the oppression they face and support them in designing their own projects that seek to challenge oppression. This paper investigates our attempt at operationalizing liberatory pedagogy through JEDI.

Methods: The first author conducted 80–150-minute semi-structured interviews with program alumni. The interview protocol was informed by constructs from liberative pedagogy, focusing on participants' experiences in the program. The first author utilized thematic coding to identify salient themes across the interviews.

Results: The analysis of the interview data revealed several successes and shortcomings related to operationalizing liberative pedagogy. One theme related to the successes was that participants expressed that JEDI offered a safe, welcoming environment in which they could embrace their marginalized identities and freely express their ideas. This finding, along with other themes that will be discussed in the paper, speak to the positive impact of the program. However, one theme related to shortcomings was that participants spoke extensively about the positive impact JEDI had on them as individuals, but they did not express that they saw their projects as having a significant external impact. We see this as a limitation regarding the program engaging the students in liberatory praxis within their local communities.

Significance: Findings from this study provide insight into the impact liberative pedagogy has on engineering students and the challenges of operationalizing liberative pedagogy in a formal university context. These results could aid the engineering education community as we continue to search for ways to support and empower students.