2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

All engineering students have self-reported elevated levels of stress, distress, and trauma (SDT) during their engineering education. Black, Latin, and Indigenous (BLI) engineering students not only face the high levels of engineering stress from the culture, they can also experience racialized interaction within their engineering education. This additional contribution of SDT based on raced experiences has been defined as racialized SDT. However, racialized SDT has not been connected to the experiences of BLI students in engineering education research (EER). This literature review seeks to clarify this gap in the literature and summarize what is known about racialized SDT in engineering. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize literature on racialized SDT and its connection with the experiences of BLI students in engineering. We explored existing research and literature on this topic to answer the following research question: How has engineering education research interrogated the experiences of Black, Latin, and Indigenous students regarding racialized stress, distress, and trauma in the context of their engineering education?
To address our research question, we performed a systematic literature review. First, we accumulated several articles in an initial database search of five journals relevant to EER. Once a preliminary set of articles was identified, we performed secondary and tertiary rounds of inclusion and exclusion as we read through the articles. Each round of exclusion was based on the applicability in addressing our research question. Then we performed a categorical analysis on the remaining articles to explore eight attributes: framework, methodology, population, research question, instrument, main result, related concepts, and unit of analysis. These attributes allowed us to examine possible trends between papers/studies and draw conclusions about how racialized SDT for BLI students has or has not been discussed in EER.
Preliminary search results indicate that limited existing research exists on BLI students' racialized experiences and their connection to SDT. This could be attributed to the BLI students’ underrepresentation and repression in engineering spaces as well as the field’s lack of understanding of racialized SDT. This result suggests there is a gap in the literature on multiple levels. There is a gap in research on BLI students’ experiences in general, and there is a gap in research on racialized SDT in engineering learning environments. Future work includes collecting empirical data on the racialized experiences of BLI students during their engineering education from their perspective. Understanding the nuanced, intersectional experiences of BLI students in engineering will advance solutions towards disrupting and dismantling the practices that perpetuate inequitable outcomes in engineering.