2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Latine and Hispanic engineering students rarely see a faculty member whose background mirrors their own. The AGEP (Alliances for Graduate Education and The Professoriate) Hiring Interventions for Representation and Equity (HIRE) project focuses on increasing Latine and Hispanic representation in the professoriate through interventions aimed at making the hiring process more equitable. As part of this larger research project, our team aims to understand and elucidate the experiences on the pathway to the professoriate of the currently underrepresented Latine/Hispanic population in STEM teaching-focused positions. To do this, we employ in-depth qualitative interviews of current teaching-focused faculty who have successfully navigated the pathway through PhD programs into the teaching professoriate. We use a subset of six interviews with Latine/Hispanic engineering teaching faculty (out of a more significant subset of 15 interviews with the broader STEM teaching professoriate). We seek to understand and elucidate the unique pathways and challenges for this population in both their pathways to their positions as well as their experiences in their current faculty positions. To analyze the pathways to the professoriate, we employ a community cultural wealth framework (Yosso, 2014) that accounts for six forms of cultural capital that communities of color employ to navigate institutions that traditionally value only hegemonically valued forms of cultural capital. In tandem with community cultural wealth, we utilize transition theory to understand their experiences moving out of the graduate student role and into faculty positions. In particular, the transition into faculty positions has been studied for non-minoritized populations and into research-focused positions. We aim to add to the literature about Latine/Hispanic faculty pathways in teaching-focused positions. We present findings from a thematic analysis of our results on the role of intersectionality (across axes such as immigration status, language, country of origin, colorism, race, gender and class) and its impact on the path to the professoriate, the use of community cultural wealth to navigate multiple institutions of higher education, and the importance of culturally relevant mentorship both on the pathway to and in faculty positions.
Yosso, T. J. (2014). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. In Critical race theory in education (pp. 181-204). Routledge.