2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Educational contexts are complex in the ways they support and fail to support student success in engineering. In border communities of the southwest, where rural communities blend across national and state boundaries, student counternarratives of educational success involve complexity. In particular, engineering students’ descriptions of language, familial backgrounds, disciplinary knowledge, hidden curriculum of US post-secondary systems, and financial services built for citizens OR international students indicate there is much to be learned about how institutions in border communities support or fail to support equitable access to engineering pathways. In a larger study, transcript analysis of 40 interviews from undergraduates at a border institution indicate scholars navigate familial and background difference across educational levels (i.e., first generation status), educational systems (e.g., educational background in Mexico compared with educational background in the United States), disciplinary differences (e.g., rigors of engineering in terms of time commitment compared with other majors). In this exploratory, work in progress study, we aim to illustrate how scholars who participate in a National Science Foundation-funded scholarship program navigate learning at the nexus of nation, discipline, and higher education systems. We developed brief counternarratives, or stories that tell truths from non-dominant perspectives about how students navigate academic pathways in the computer science department. The authors identify how the counternarratives point toward needed policy and practice change in the department and hope to gain feedback from the EQUITY community regarding our efforts and next steps at Praxis, sharing these counternarratives in departmental spaces to draw out faculty, staff, and student dialog toward change.