2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering education's broadening participation goals have emphasized understanding the experiences of historically excluded students as a mode for promoting diversity and inclusivity within the field. This research began from the premise that students' experiences in engineering teamwork, where students must negotiate ideas, task allocation, and engineering decisions, are a space where racialized and gendered dynamics become salient. However, engineering education often conflates the experiences of historically excluded students (e.g., women, Black, Latino/a/x, Indigenous), when research suggests the ways that racism shapes students’ experiences and learning differ substantially across these groups. Thus, we sought to answer the following research questions: (1) How do Black engineering students' experiences in team-based pedagogies shape their learning in engineering? (2) What role does race/racism play in shaping Black students' experiences in team-based pedagogies in engineering? (3) What strategies do Black students adopt for navigating negative experiences in teamwork pedagogies in engineering education?

We drew on and expanded the Model of Inequitable Task Allocation (MITA) described by Fowler and Su, as a framework to examine Black students’ participation in teamwork pedagogies in engineering. While the MITA framework was developed to study gendered social processes in engineering teamwork, our work expanded on the model to probe specific mechanisms that support and inhibit Black engineering students’ participation in teamwork pedagogies. We began by interviewing engineering students who self-identified as Black/African American representing universities across the United States. While the full sample includes 29 students, this paper represents the insights of eight second-year Black engineering students. Following each interview, members of the research team engaged in reflective discussions about (a) the efficacy of the interview protocol for capturing Black students' experiences, (b) the ways that the participant's teamwork experiences aligned with or departed from our own experiences, and (c) the ways that different understandings of racial identity shaped how students recounted and interpreted their experiences.

In this paper, we discuss insights from Black engineering students on race/racism and their impact on student participation and learning in teamwork pedagogies. For example, existing research has posited that, while studies traditionally conceptualize Black identity as monolithic, scholars have begun to address critiques of the ways that Blackness and Black identity have been conceptualized as monolithic by offering frameworks that reflect diasporic discourses to understand how elements of various Black cultural backgrounds shape the ways students come to and experience higher education. For example, students pointed to intraracial dynamics, the role of multiraciality, transnationalism, and other dynamics that shape their experiences in engineering. We also discuss implications of these findings for (a) faculty pedagogical decision making for supporting Black engineering students in teamwork pedagogies, (b) research on broadening participation in engineering, as well as research on Black engineering students more broadly, and (c) institutional policymaking for recruiting and retaining Black engineering students.