2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper is a an empirical research paper. In higher education institutions, Latine/Hispanic teaching-focused faculty (those faculty who devote at least 50% of their position to teaching) are an integral part of creating equitable and inclusive environments for Latine/Hispanic students. While latine enrollment rates and bachelor degree completion in engineering have continued to rise over time (NCSES, 2022), data indicates that in comparison to white students, both rates for leaving STEM disciplines and college dropout rates for Latines in STEM are significantly higher (Riegle-Crumb et al., 2019). These disparities indicate a need to better understand better both what is working in terms of supporting Latine students in engineering higher education, as well as what is responsible for pushing these same students out of the engineering field.

Our project examines the labor of servingness (Garcia et al., 2019), the concept of institutionally supporting the academic success, cultural inclusion, and institutional needs of minoritized student populations, that Latine teaching focused faculty enact within higher education engineering departments. We analyze this concept through in depth-qualitative interviews and narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2006) methods with seven Latine/Hispanic engineering teaching focused faculty at various institution types ranging from community colleges to R1 universities (while drawing on a larger sample of 19 STEM teaching focused faculty). Through these methods we interrogate (1) the pathways to the professoriate for these individuals including their experiences with mentorship and issues along the pathways related to being served and (2) their work in their current positions specifically related to serving Latine/Hispanic student populations.

Our analysis finds that this population of engineering faculty through their service and teaching create and design spaces/programs that profoundly work to provide a foundation for the inclusion and retention of Latine students within their discipline. Additionally, they provide a crucial source of mentorship and role-modeling for students who share identity characteristics with them (including gender, ethnicity/race, class background, first generation student status etc.), characteristics which are minoritized in both engineering education and the engineering workforce. This mentorship validates culturally diverse students (Rendon 1994) in the engineering field, where the professoriate remains predominantly white and male. This mentoring and advising work is often done without institutional recognition, and is stated to come often as a way of altruistically giving students support that these faculty did not have along their pathways, or reciprocating the support that they did have.

Our recommendations center on how institutions can work to support these faculty in their servingness endeavors by 1) recognizing the cultural taxation (Padilla, 1994) and servingness work they do in tenure and promotion discussions, 2) creating early career mentorship and community for the Latine/Hispanic STEM professoriate, and 3) increasing Latine faculty hiring to lessen the already heavy load on existing faculty who are often if not always the only Latine person in their department. Overall, we argue that these faculty are models for servingness, and learning from and supporting them can lead to benefits both in terms of academic outcomes and campus cultural climates for Latine/Hispanic students.