2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper shares and compares the experiences of initiating and sustaining two graduate student-led international ethnic engineering education scholarly communities for Chinese and African groups. Our goal is to reflect on our lived experiences and inspire future students and academics to cultivate such communities to broaden participation and enhance research capability. We adopt the Community of Practice (CoP) as the theoretical framework and opt for comparative ethnographic narrative analysis as the method in this paper. Specifically, we focused on the following dimensions of two communities led by the two authors: (1) the origin and purpose; (2) the characteristics; and (3) practices. Our findings suggest that the reasons behind and the processes of forming these two communities were alike. Interestingly, both communities differed in terms of their leadership structures and the ongoing activities. In this paper, we highlight how both communities value providing and sustaining a safe space for their members to explore and develop their professional interests and intersectional identities. Thus, we call for the emergence of similar communities that could help ethnic engineering education communities not just survive the rigors of their domains of inquiry, but thrive throughout their entire doctoral or professional careers. We adopt the Community of Practice (CoP) as the theoretical framework and opt for comparative ethnographic narrative analysis as the method in this paper. The method lends us an opportunity to narrate and compare our respective lived experiences in starting and sustaining communities of practice peculiar to our international ethnic communities. Our method involves periodic meetings to discuss the mainstays of both the African Engineering Education Fellows (AEEF) in the Diaspora group and the Chinese Engineering Education Club (CEEC). These conversations are tracked with notes taken during our meetings as we discuss the differences and similarities of the groups. Specifically, we focused on the following dimensions of two communities led by the two authors, including (1) the origin and purpose; (2) the characteristics; (3) and practices. How and why the two communities were initiated are alike. Yet the major difference occurs in the leadership structure and the ongoing activities.
The findings suggest that both communities were formed around the same time, with similar purposes of serving as safe spaces and resources to boost the professional development of their members. Likewise, the diversity and the membership structure for both communities are similar in terms of the geographical locations of members, work and study experiences, and volunteerism. Conversely, the differences of both communities emerged from their different leadership and organizational structures. Due to the different sizes of members, sustaining the communities took place in various forms. For the Chinese community, the spontaneous Q&A and information sharing and the informal gathering at the major conferences help the community members to continuously maintain their intersectional identities as Chinese identities and the engineering education research scholar identity. For the African Diaspora community, the growth model relies on informal but regular gatherings, recentering and decolonizing our experiences, expanding the representation of member African countries within the group, and tackling projects in Africa by interfacing with other existing external bodies. However, both communities value the virtue of providing and sustaining a safe space for its members to explore and develop their professional interests and intersectional identities. Thus, we call for more similar communities that could emerge for meaningful groups of individuals to survive and thrive in their domain of inquiry and stay encouraged and supported to experience their entire doctoral or professional careers.