2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Whether in response to the mental health crisis or the widespread inequities and discrimination within engineering graduate programs, the graduate engineering education community needs to take targeted action to create systemic change and healing from standing systemic issues. This collaborative research project focuses on graduate program faculty administrators, or Graduate Program Directors (GPDs), who are central to improving and sustaining graduate mental health and well-being. GPDs can shape departmental procedures, enact institutional policies, and disrupt power dynamics between faculty and students. Yet, as prior work has shown, little attention is given to and little is known about GPDs. Through research on those who hold power in the graduate engineering ecosystem, we can re-imagine the defaults of graduate education to support students experiencing, or who have experienced, trauma, a severe and highly interconnected mental health outcome. In particular, we leverage trauma-informed frameworks of care, theoretically-informed models of care that guide practice. These frameworks can enable engineering graduate education to realize the widespread impacts of trauma, recognize the signs and symptoms of trauma, and respond by fully integrating knowledge about trauma into practice and policy to prevent (re)traumatization of individuals and groups.

This paper and poster will provide an overview of the entire project plan and preliminary results of our first two research questions: (1) What are the characteristic roles of engineering graduate program directors in fostering cultures of care in their programs? and (2) How do the systemic structures within higher education impact engineering graduate program directors’ implementation of trauma-informed frameworks of care? Using a two-phase research design, the research team, composed of faculty and graduate students, seeks to learn from and with GPDs. Through multiple forms of data collection (i.e., national survey, interviews), Phase 1 is characterizing the extent to which and how programs leverage care practices and where change is needed. Phase 2 will leverage the resulting characterizations to co-create an evidence-based professional development framework for designing trauma-informed systems of care within engineering graduate programs. As part of Phase 1, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 8 Graduate Program Directors and Coordinators (i.e., administrative staff who support the graduate program) from a diverse set of institutions and disciplinary programs. The interviews sought to understand the roles and responsibilities of the GPDs and coordinators as well as the experiences of the GPDs and coordinators as they seek to support their students, especially in cases where students could or are experiencing trauma. Leveraging trauma-informed frameworks of care and systems analysis techniques, the data analysis has focused on the first two research questions. Preliminary results will be shared to provide a foundation for future professional development activities that seek to partner and co-create with engineering GPDs ways that can make care a programmatic default within their programs and institutions.