2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Elevating Community Visions of Equity, Culture, and Social Justice in Education (ECSJ) for Minoritized Students through Photovoice

Presented at An ECSJ Art Show - Equity and Justice through Art (Equity, Culture & Social Justice in Education Division ECSJ Technical Session 6)

This Arts-Based Research paper describes how engagement in participatory action research (PAR) can lead student researchers to engage with Equity, Culture, and Social Justice (ECSJ) in Education. Anti-deficit-based methodologies are critical to supporting minoritized students pursuing higher education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. In particular, minoritized STEM students at research-intensive institutions are often subjected to practices that minimize their identity of blackness to fit the status quo in higher education. Engaging in community-based participatory research (CBPR) and participatory action research (PAR) invites research participants to integrate their scholarship and activism, leading to solutions that matter to them. Participatory research methods elevate participants’ voices during the research process and intervention development. Photovoice empowers individuals by capturing their experiences through photography and focus group discussions, highlighting the individual and the collective.

This retrospective qualitative study demonstrates how participation in Participatory Action Research (PAR) can impact undergraduate and graduate student researchers’ engineering education pathways, understandings, and beliefs. Participants completed an open-ended, qualitative survey and participated in 30-minute semi-structured interviews. The transcripts and survey data were analyzed using two rounds of reflexive thematic analysis. Initial coding was deductive, using the 2025 pillars of ESCJ as a priori codes to better situate findings within the ESCJ community and commitments. The second round of coding was inductive. The results indicate that engagement in PAR, particularly photovoice, assisted in highlighting student beliefs about three ESCJ pillars: Spotlighting normalized violence, The classroom as a terrain of struggle and site of possibility, Sovereignty and the speculative, and Grounding in movement and lineages of organizing. This suggests that photovoice and other PAR engagements may be an effective way for minoritized student researchers to find purpose in their research.

Authors
  1. Dr. Jerrod A Henderson Orcid 16x16http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-0501-5805 University of Houston William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering [biography]
Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025