2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this empirical work-in-progress paper, we examine the use of photovoice methodology during interviews with a cohort of student fellows in an interdisciplinary engineering professional development program. This program provides financial support, professional development, and networking opportunities for mechanical and automotive engineering students across three higher education institutions in the southeast: a large research-intensive university, a military college, and a technical college. The current cohort of student fellows (n = 7) are graduate students at the research-intensive university and undergraduate students at the military college. As a fellow, students are expected to complete an end-of-semester interview that leverages photovoice methodology, which allows students to guide the interviews through their selected images. Photovoice methodology encourages students to take photos of important events throughout the semester that encompass their experience as a fellow within the program or as an engineering student broadly. We asked the students to provide ten photos, then during the interview, narrow down to the five photos they would like to discuss. The chosen photos are then used as a starting point for the interview as students answer questions that guide them to describe and explain the impact of the chosen photos.

We have conducted interviews for Fall 2024 and Spring 2025. Through using photovoice, students discussed topics not initially on our radar such as how they spent time in nature to de-stress. This is in part due to the agency students enact during interviews in not only choosing which photos to share but also in how they are connecting those captured moments to their experiences as a student fellow, student, and/or engineer. We revised the protocol from an approach that focuses on a broad array of contextual influences to one that balances context with program impacts. Going into the Fall 2025 interviews, we revised and refined the interview protocol to better align interviews with the purpose of exploring cohort experience and to provide some programmatic feedback, thus better aligning the interviews with the program’s goals. The Fall 2025 interviews still leverage photovoice methodology but have reduced the number of requested photos to two main photos that will be discussed. The interviews will continue to start with the photovoice-specific questions to explore the student experience in whichever directions the students choose to take us, and then we will transition into a more typical semi-structured interview with prepared questions examining the program impact, benefit, and overall experience.

This paper aims to showcase the lessons we have learned in utilizing photovoice methodology, including increasing the agency it provides students to drive the interview and the adaptations to consider when examining experience broadly as a student and as a student fellow in a program. Additionally, the programs first year of photovoice interviews will be compared to the upcoming academic year’s interviews to identify if the change in protocol results in data revolving around how the program has impacted the fellows while still utilizing the student driven photovoice methodology.