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

Dr. Jeremy A. Magruder Waisome http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8710-2637 University of Florida [biography]

Dr. Jeremy A. Magruder Waisome is the Thomas O. Hunter Rising Star Assistant Professor in the Engineering Education Department at the University of Florida (UF). Her research focuses on self-efficacy and critical mentoring in engineering and computing. She is passionate about broadening participation and leverages evidence-based approaches to improve the engineering education environment.
Dr. Jerrod A Henderson http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-0501-5805 University of Houston William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering [biography]

Dr. Jerrod A. Henderson (“Dr. J”) is an Assistant Professor in the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the Cullen College of Engineering at the University of Houston (UH).
He began his higher education pursuits at Morehouse College and North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, where he earned degrees in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering as a part of the Atlanta University Center’s Dual Degree in Engineering Program. While in college, he was a Ronald E. McNair Scholar, which afforded him the opportunity to intern at NASA Langley. He also earned distinction as a Phi Beta Kappa member and an American Chemical Society Scholar. Dr. Henderson completed his Ph.D. in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a graduate student, he was a NASA Harriet G. Jenkins Graduate Fellow and mentor for the Summer Research Opportunities Program.
Dr. Henderson has dedicated his career to increasing the number of students who are in pathways to pursue STEM careers. He believes that exposing students to STEM early will have a lasting impact on their lives and academic pursuits. He co-founded the St. Elmo Brady STEM Academy (SEBA). SEBA is an educational intervention that introduces underrepresented and underserved fourth and fifth-grade students and their families to hands-on STEM experiences.
Dr. Henderson is the immediate past Director of the Program for Mastery in Engineering Studies (PROMES, pronounced “promise”), a program aimed at increasing engineering student achievement, engagement, and graduation rates. His research group seeks to understand engineering identity trajectories and success mechanisms throughout lifespans using action-based participatory research and novel methodologies such as photovoice, IPA, and draw-an-engineer and the development of research-informed interventions to improve student success.
He was most recently recognized by INSIGHT Into Diversity Magazine as an Inspiring STEM Leader, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (LAS) Outstanding Young Alumni Award, Career Communications Group with a Black Engineer of the Year Award for college-level promotion of engineering education and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2023 to advance his work that centers engineering identities of Black men in engineering.

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