2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background

There is a critical need to broaden participation in Aerospace Engineering to meet the growing demand, [1], [2], [3]. As the scope of aerospace engineering expands to include advancements in areas ranging from environmental sciences to public health, enhancing the participation and retention of students is crucial to addressing global challenges in these areas. Achieving this goal necessitates large-scale reforms across all stages of the educational pathway, including identifying and mitigating the obstacles faced by students throughout their journey.

One important aspect within aerospace engineering education is the hidden curriculum—the unspoken set of expectations, cultural norms, values, and institutional practices in the field that shape students' experiences, often without explicit acknowledgment [4]. Scholars in various fields have used the concept of hidden curriculum to examine implicit norms in educational settings, finding that hidden curriculum can operate formally through course content and grading standards but more often functions informally through instructor comments, social cues, and everyday interactions on campus [5]. These implicit expectations, values, and norms, which are often unnoticed by faculty, play a powerful role in shaping students' experiences [6]. For students, depending on their past lived experiences, these norms, rooted in mainstream cultural values, can pose additional challenges that impact their community development and success [4].

The hidden curriculum within aerospace engineering could be particularly important given the field’s historical ties to the military-industrial complex and a culture rooted in national pride and a relentless expectation to advance warfighter readiness. For example, there is invariably the implicit assumption that a student possesses prior knowledge of military aircraft, stemming from experiences with model or toy planes. This expectation, unacknowledged in the formal curriculum, reflects a hidden curriculum that can negatively impact students who lack such exposure.

Implementation

We began by focusing on the student experience within the Aerospace Engineering department in two areas that are the easiest to impact – the curriculum, and the facilities for experiential learning. Feedback from students informed the initial changes to the curriculum and motivated changes to the facilities. We also assess the current student experience within the Aerospace Engineering department through a lens of students’ sense of community, with a goal of eventually relating the experiences of students to factors within the hidden curriculum.

One proven approach to increasing a student’s sense of community is experiential learning. Be it undergraduate research, co-curricular student activities like design competition teams, or course-based activities, hands-on experience has proven to help students feel they belong. That motivated an attempt to increase the number of experiential learning opportunities available to our students, both inside and outside of the classroom.

This paper will discuss changes to the technical elective program within the curriculum driven by past student feedback. Then the paper will focus on all aspects of the facility improvements for the educational laboratory space as well as the increased integration of experiential learning into the curriculum. This will include the motivating factors, the approach taken to selecting improvements, the improvements themselves, and the unusual method for implementing some of these changes. Also presented will be survey results related to the student experience.

References
[1] J. P. Silva-Martinez, “Diversity and Inclusion in the Aerospace Industry and the Role of Leaders,” in ASCEND 2023, in ASCEND. , American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2023. doi: 10.2514/6.2023-4737.
[2] C. A. Moore Jr. and C. Shih, “Implementing Structured Mentorship to Broaden Participation of Underrepresented Minorities in Aerospace Engineering,” in 2023 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, ASEE, Jun. 2023. doi: 10.18260/1-2—42286.
[3] A. Staff, “2022 Aerospace and Defense Workforce Study: How do you reshape today’s workforce and attract tomorrow’s talent?,” Aerospace Industries Association and AIAA, 2022.
[4] E. Margolis, The hidden curriculum in higher education. Psychology Press, 2001.
[5] T. Hinchcliffe, “The hidden curriculum of higher education,” Advance HE, Jul. 2020. Accessed: Dec. 17, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/advance-he/AdvHE_Hidden%20Curriculum_1597673443.pdf
[6] K. Hubbard, P. Gawthorpe, L. Fallin, and D. Henri, “Addressing the hidden curriculum during transition to HE: the importance of empathy,” in The hidden curriculum of higher education, T. Hinchcliffe, Ed., 2020, pp. 59–76.