2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 256: Encouraging Low-Income, High Achieving Undergraduate Students to Pursue Faculty Positions: Developing Socially Conscious Approaches to Pedagogy

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

Within engineering, there is a need for more diverse faculty representation to support and serve as role models for underrepresented students. To attract, support, and retain diverse candidates, the pipeline and preparation of faculty must be better addressed. To investigate effective supports, the University of Massachusetts Lowell S-STEM program recruits and supports low-income, high-achieving students who wish to pursue a career in higher education. The UML S-STEM program supports scholars for four years, from their third year in undergraduate studies through the completion of either a master's degree or a qualifying exam within a Ph.D. program. To prepare the students in the program for future faculty positions, they are grouped in cohorts and meet monthly. In this report, we present our programming activities to develop self-awareness and social awareness. The activities of the monthly meetings center around building social consciousness through first developing students’ self-awareness in the context of their engineering journeys, and then through a more general investigation of their understanding of the importance and impact of cultural orientations within and beyond engineering. The aim of the programming was to inspire awareness of the different experiences and needs of students in engineering education. Participants were given brief surveys at the end of each activity, and they participated in end-of-year focus groups. The results indicated the approach taken helped students reflect on their own cultural orientation to teaching and learning, as well as that of their peers.

Authors

Janna Jobel University of Massachusetts, Lowell [biography]

Dr. Janna Jobel received her PhD in Educational Leadership researching the ways in which social emotional competencies are taught in STEM high schools. She is now a postdoctoral research associate in the Biomedical Engineering department of UMass Lowell conducting interdisciplinary research to better understand what factors most influence the K-20 STEM pipeline.
Dr. Hsien-Yuan Hsu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2155-2093 University of Massachusetts, Lowell [biography]

Dr. Hsien-Yuan Hsu is an Assistant Professor in Research and Evaluation in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Dr. Hsu received his PhD in Educational Psychology from Texas A&M University and has a background of statistics
Dr. Yanfen Li http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-9465-7147 University of Massachusetts, Lowell [biography]

Dr. Yanfen Li is an Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She received her Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2018. Dr. Li has extensive experience in engineering education focusing on recruitment and retention of underrepresented and under resourced students and engineering pedagogy. Her work spans the areas of curriculum instruction and design, program design and evaluation, and the first-year college experience. Dr Li’s research group aims to further the development of a diverse workforce in engineering and STEM. She is the PI of a NSF Scholarship in STEM grant aimed at supporting high achieving, low-income students to complete their bachelor’s degrees and continue on to graduate school. She has received several teaching awards including the UMass Lowell Award for Excellence in Innovative Teaching in 2021 and the Biomedical Engineering Teaching Award from the American Society for Engineering Education in 2021.

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