2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This WIP research paper will begin to address the pressing need by exploring critically first- and second-year engineering students’ experiences about how learning engineering knowledge shapes their beliefs and thoughts about what engineering is. Specifically, inviting these students’ experiences, particularly those with LGBTQIA+ identifications, can serve as fundamental foundations for deconstructing the engineering knowledge system by exposing and uncovering the oppressive elements of such system through students’ experiences.

Queering has been a crucial practice and scholarship toward affecting systemic change in the educational system. Grounded in queer theories, queering focuses on constantly questioning and deconstructing epistemology to uncover and expose the cisgender and heteronormative nature of knowledge production and the perpetuation of such production in education. Engineering epistemology, similarly, has been found to be highly heteronormative and cisgender in nature. Current efforts to include LGBTQIA+ members into the engineering community, though important, are not sufficient to affect the engineering knowledge system that is unwelcoming and treacherous to those who do not conform to cis-het identities. There is a pressing need to work on deconstructing the engineering knowledge system that oppresses non-conforming participants toward a higher-level change of engineering education.
I ground my study with bell hook’s engaged pedagogy, which argues for seeing students as whole human beings in the classroom, focusing on their well-being, and inviting them to participate in the construction of knowledge. Queering efforts have called for focusing learning on desire, joy, and wonder, and hook’s engaged pedagogy has been consistently recommended as one pedagogical philosophy to shape such learning. My research will invite such idea of wholeness and participation to my future student participants, and potentially invoke their thoughts about the current engineering knowledge system that may or may not spark the idea of wholeness and participation in their engineering classrooms.

I will conduct a mixed-method study that includes a confidential survey and follow-up interviews with consented participants. Considering the current climate toward the LGBTQIA+ community, I will administer a survey to understand all students’ experiences in learning engineering knowledge, with questions grounded in hook’s engaged pedagogy, and at the same time, provide a confidential space for students to share with me their gender and sexual identifications. The survey will help me identify students who are willing to have conversations with me about their experiences with learning engineering knowledge, and how their experiences intersect with their identifications and shape their thoughts about what engineering is. I will conduct emergent coding to analyze the survey and interviews.

This study is currently in the data collection phase, and I anticipate completion of data analysis, and writing of this paper before the first draft deadline for the conference. Based on existing literature, I anticipate similar themes found about the heteronormative and cisgender nature of the engineering knowledge systems. However, I also anticipate a deeper exploration of the intersections among such systems, learning of such knowledge, and what it means to be an engineer who could potentially learn in classrooms that respect students as holistic human beings.