2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As a growing U.S. college student population with strong potential to bring intersectional diversity, technical skills, and leadership experience to engineering education, veterans and service members deserve particular attention. Student Veterans and Service Members (SVSM) include those who have served but no longer serve (i.e., military veterans), and those who concurrently serve part-time while attending college. One key reason that higher education policies and practices require added scrutiny relates to how SVSM uniquely experience more than one transitioning identity as they enter college: military service member to civilian veteran, professional or technical expert to student learner, a member of the “military family” culture to a “lone wolf” embedded within an academic culture that is likely (a) uniformed and (b) implicitly as well as explicitly adverse to who SVSM were/are as military service members. These experiences create asymmetric obstacles—those unaligned with or unaffected by common college support structures—for SVSM. To provide equitable support for SVSM in engineering education, emerging research suggests it is crucial to educate and engage the broader instructional and support community in providing awareness, allyship, and advocacy for SVSM in engineering education.

This full paper describes the development and outcomes of a modular, assets-based training framework that aims to fill critical awareness gaps within the support community and unmet needs of SVSM in engineering. Derived from a need-based origin, military awareness trainings are often maintained at an institutional level and (unintentionally) framed using deficit thinking. Particularly harmful to students from non-dominant groups, deficit thinking places “blame” for difficulty and failure on missing or aberrant student attributes, characteristics, or traits stemming from students’ personal identities, cultures, and communities–rather than acknowledging how institutional structures may favor typical or “traditional” students. Resultantly, higher education military awareness trainings often lack the broad contextual awareness, peer inclusion, and mentorship aspects needed to support SVSM in light of their varied identities and experiences.

Our evidence and community-informed approach called engaged scholarship, aligned within the critical research paradigm, aspires to restory deficit perspectives by increasing awareness of multi-layered SVSM transition experiences and highlighting unique strengths SVSM bring to engineering education. Findings from our ongoing research with undergraduate SVSM in engineering, as well as insights from the empirical literature and collaboration with institutional agents (i.e., faculty, staff, advisors, and administrators), inform our developmental efforts. The training framework not only addresses asymmetric barriers experienced by SVSM in engineering, but also brings visibility to the strengths and motivations SVSMs enact. The training includes financial, social, academic, and identity-related topics derived from the eight categories of wellness to promote holistic SVSM support. Espousing an equity-based support model of awareness, allyship, advocacy, and accompliceship, the training framework strives to acknowledge existing levels of SVSM awareness among IA and student peers, while showcasing opportunities to move further along this continuum. The framework’s modularized form enables IAs across different roles and institutions, including two- and four-year institutions, to tailor training for varied audiences. Outcomes from framework implementation with authentic audiences and future work will be presented and discussed.