2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The narratives we tell ourselves influence our behaviors and actions. However, engineering students may not even know what those narratives are and how those stories are affecting them. In many cases, students are subjected to a rigorous technical curriculum as soon as they step foot on campus and sometimes find themselves in fields that are predominantly white and male to which they may not feel they fully belong. For some students, these environments may make them question if they belong in engineering, on our campus, or in higher education at all.
Story is a tool that can allow students to make connections between their past, current, and potential future selves to develop their identity as an engineer. Students who may not otherwise view themselves as an engineer, a curious person, an entrepreneur, a person with great ideas that society needs, or a part of the university’s ecosystem, may be able to demonstrate their potential to themselves and to their community through their lived experiences. Providing time for students to develop and tell their stories is a powerful way to validate students’ vast experiences they bring with them to the academe. Faculty want to know their students and students want to know themselves. Our work with story in this context was inspired by the KEEN on Stories project and reflects our interest in instilling an entrepreneurial mindset in our students.
In this paper, we describe the storytelling opportunities we offer student engineers in their freshman, junior, and senior years, such as writing stories in a variety of classes and disseminating their stories through podcasting. Using interviews, we share and reflect on the impacts of these storytelling opportunities for students and for faculty.