2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Creativity is a critical aspect of engineering, yet students’ prior creative experiences and identities as crafters or artists are often not valued in their engineering education. One place some undergraduate engineering students have creative experiences is through their personal histories and engagement in the arts. However, these students frequently perceive a distinct gap between their engineering education and the arts, even though the foundations of artistic practices share various similarities with engineering competencies. There is limited previous research on the connections between crafting practices and how this may relate to engineering education at large, especially from student perspectives that also consider the formation of both artist and engineering identities. In this work-in-progress paper, connections between undergraduate engineering students' experiences with fiber arts crafting practices, their engineering studies, and how this relates to their identities as engineers and artists were explored through semi-structured interviews that were examined with grounded theory analysis. Preliminary findings suggest that students see their crafting skills as a benefit in their engineering education because their previous crafting experiences have made them more open to experimentation, failure, and hands-on education, though students struggled with naming a clear identity of engineer, crafter, or something in between. Participant responses also give insight into gendered experiences in crafting and engineering, such as the higher rate of women in crafting spaces versus their engineering courses, as well as motivation for participating in both of those practices. This research may provide insight into areas in which students with artistic experience can be better welcomed into pathways into engineering education and how the adoption of crafting-as-engineering could open avenues for increased creativity in engineering. Furthermore, this preliminary study has implications for making explicit connections between crafting and engineering education to leverage students' experiences with crafting to improve motivation and provide better quality engineering education experiences. Future work will include interviewing additional students and a continued analysis of interview transcripts to understand how students’ prior experience in creative practices connects to their identity and conceptualization of their engineering education.