2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

“Do I really belong here?”: A single case Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of How a Black Male Engineering Student Experiences Sense of Belonging (Research)

Presented at Minorities in Engineering Division(MIND) Technical Session 3

Abstract

Humans have an innate need to feel connected to and valued by their community. Likewise, college students navigating early adulthood are not immune from feeling the need to connect to their campus community. The college years are a critical period of identity development, where belonging reflects the extent to which they feel recognized and valued as a member of their academic community. As such, research has consistently linked students’ sense of belonging to persistence, engagement, and well-being. For Black college students, belonging is shaped not only by developmental processes, but also by racialized institutional contexts and experiences that often threaten their belonging. Although a growing body of STEM education research has examined belonging, relatively little work has attended to the specific experiences of Black male engineering students. Existing studies frequently aggregate Black males into broader minoritized groups, combine Black students (males and females), or examine belonging outside specific engineering contexts. This pattern contrasts with a more robust literature on Black females’ experiences in engineering and STEM, leaving Black males’ meaning-making around belonging in engineering underexplored.

This project, part of an ongoing longitudinal study, uses a single-case Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach. We conducted two semi-structured interviews with a Black male undergraduate biomedical engineering student (Rashad) in his first year of study to answer our research question: How does a Black male undergraduate engineering student experience a sense of belonging? We analyzed the transcripts using an IPA approach, engaging in descriptive, linguistic, and conceptual coding to examine Rashad’s lived experiences in depth. We inductively developed two themes, Seeing and Being Seen, and The Meritocratic Hope, which characterize Rashad’s experiences of sense of belonging. Findings reaffirm the irreplaceable value of representation for Black students, in both broader campus and smaller classroom contexts, in fostering an engineering sense of belonging. At the same time, findings indicate a hidden balancing act with meritocratic beliefs, in which the participant simultaneously draws hope from meritocracy as a pathway to advancement while remaining cautious about fully embracing an ideal that may obscure structural inequities and undermine belonging. These findings address an important gap in the literature and add to the ongoing research on Black males in engineering.

Keywords: Sense of Belonging, single case IPA, Black male engineering

Authors

Mr. Jared Andrias Cammon University of Houston [biography]

Jared Cammon is a Graduate Research Assistant with the Henderson Research Group and is in his 5th year of his PhD program in the Biomedical engineering department at the University of Houston. He has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a M.S. in Bioengineering, both from Clemson University. As a non-traditional student, Jared has experience working as a biomedical research engineer at the Johnson Space Center, but for the last 11 years has been an Instructor for Engineering and Engineering Technology at Lone Star Community College Cy-Fair. His research interests involve understanding the Sense of Belonging of Black male undergraduate engineering students, and how it interacts with engineering identity development, along with its dynamics over time as it pertains to engineering student persistence and success. He has a passion to lead and guide students in their path through engineering and to foster meaningful experiences which will motivate, excite, and grow skills needed in their academic and professional pursuits. He has served as a Student Success Mentor, a co-advisor for the Lone Star Cy-Fair chapter of NSBE, and a co-advisor for the Lone Star Cy-Fair Engineering Design Team.
Dr. Jerrod A Henderson http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-0501-5805 University of Houston - COE [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 both 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's Langley Research Center. 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. During his time as a graduate student, he was a NASA Harriet G. Jenkins Graduate Fellow.

Dr. Henderson has dedicated his career to increasing the number of students who are on 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 is the co-founder of the St. Elmo Brady STEM Academy (SEBA). SEBA is an educational intervention aimed at exposing fourth and fifth-grade students and their families to hands-on STEM experiences.

His research group aims to understand student engineering identity trajectories and success mechanisms, using interpretative qualitative, and action-based participatory research methods.

He was most recently recognized by INSIGHT Into Diversity Magazine as an Inspiring STEM Leader, by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (LAS) Outstanding Young Alumni Award, and with 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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