| NSF Org: |
EEC Division of Engineering Education and Centers |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 7, 2017 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 31, 2020 |
| Award Number: | 1752897 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Kemi Ladeji-Osias
jladejio@nsf.gov (703)292-7708 EEC Division of Engineering Education and Centers ENG Directorate for Engineering |
| Start Date: | September 15, 2017 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2021 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $498,953.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $537,482.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2020 = $38,529.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
310 E CAMPUS RD RM 409 ATHENS GA US 30602-1589 (706)542-5939 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
310 East Campus Rd. Athens GA US 30602-1589 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | EngEd-Engineering Education |
| Primary Program Source: |
01002021DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.041 |
ABSTRACT
The field of engineering needs to recruit and retain more diverse student populations to be able to provide the broadly educated, technical workforce necessary to address the global challenges facing society. Identifying and addressing key barriers to students' access to and success in engineering have presented vexing challenges for engineering educators and engineering programs across the country. There is growing evidence that cultural characteristics of engineering programs, such as high levels of competitiveness and increasing performance pressures, might lead to exclusionary social dynamics that can discourage some students from persisting in the field. This project draws on the psychological concepts of affect in order to explore individual students' responses to these exclusionary dynamics. More specifically, individual responses to these social dynamics might be informed by a harsh, and often unfounded, self-assessment relative to perceived social or performance expectations. The study will collect and analyze data from students' experiences in engineering programs to develop a foundational understanding of the influences and dynamics that provide the context for experiences related to perceiving a disconnection from engineering. The findings from this research will be used to inform the design of more inclusive engineering learning environments and to develop strategies for students to build resilience and succeed in their engineering studies.
The goal of this project is to develop a fundamental, theoretical understanding of the role of particular forms of affect in engineering students' professional formation. Some particular affective states related to professional formation may be defined as a pervasive, strikingly painful experiential state related to an overly critical evaluation of self, prompted by a comparison to socially constructed expectations of conduct or performance in a particular cultural setting. This project examines both individual experiences of, and responses to these affective states and the social dynamics that provide the context and prompt the self-evaluation. The research design combines interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to investigate the individual perspective and ethnographic methods to explore the cultural context. More specifically, IPA comprises interviews with engineering students that are analyzed for internal psychological experiences of negative affect in professional formation. The influences and dynamics of such affective states captured at the individual level are used to elicit student experiences in semi-structured focus groups discussion. These focus groups provide an understanding of the social patterns that inform the cultural construction of norms and expectations in engineering programs. The synthesis of both analyses will result in a comprehensive model of how certain forms of affect accompany professional formation in the context of engineering, as understood from both the embodied individual and the sociocultural realities of engineering students. This understanding of these affective states as socio-psychological phenomena provides insights into exclusionary mechanisms and dynamics that may lie at the heart of issues of underrepresentation and attrition in engineering programs.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The outcomes of this project are crucial in promoting a scholarship of care within engineering education research. Engineering education research has long spoken in the bifurcated realms of promoting success among engineering students (e.g., retention, competence, knowledge gains) and advancing outcomes of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This project broke new ground in examining the well-being of engineering students by introducing the theoretical concept of professional shame, a construct that we operationalized through our interdisciplinary literature understanding of shame and our empirical findings which reveal the patterned ways that this emotion operates in contexts of professional socialization. By defining a new concept, we are setting the stage for engineering education research to evolve by building research questions that arise from theoretical frameworks created within engineering education research rather than applied from outside fields.
Through the work of this project, we define professional shame to be marked by the following four features, where individuals:
* perceive themselves to have failed to meet socially constructed expectations that are relevant to their identities in a professional domain
* experience a painful emotional state
* attribute the failure to meet expectations to an inadequate whole self
* co-contribute to the expectations that are the basis for professional shame.
In this project, we studied the lived experience of professional shame as experienced white male engineering students (the majority group in relation to race-gender background), students who come from marginalized backgrounds in engineering (i.e., women, students of color), and focus groups of both similar and diverse students in relation to social background. Through extensive qualitative research, we learned the following:
* Students construct expectations for what it means to become an engineer based on stated and implicit or unintended messages conveyed in their educational experiences.
* When students fail to achieve these expectations, they may experience professional shame.
* Professional shame is an inevitable emotional state that will be encountered when students are considering who they are in relation to the norms and expectations of engineering education and practice.
* When white male students experience professional shame, they may behave in ways that amplify the shame for themselves and (likely) other students.
* When minoritized students experience professional shame, they may question their holistic belonging within engineering contexts.
* For all students, professional shame can be positively experienced as a motivator to pursue social connection within their engineering departments and normalize the painful emotional state that they feel.
For educators in engineering disciplines, the outcomes of this investigation are particularly timely. The climate of engineering programs in colleges and universities within the United States is marked with a powerful sense of anxiety and insecurity, a phenomenon that may be attributed to institutions adapting COVID-19, heightened awareness of systemic racism, and a general well-documented increase in mental health concerns among engineering students. Now more than ever, we must develop discipline-specific ways of understanding how our students can individually and collectively develop a healthy sense of well-being. Our project is providing a way for engineering educators across the nation to be aware of how their teaching practices and departmental policies affect the emotional experiences of their students. The outcomes of our project help to make visible specific ways that administrators and faculty unintentionally contribute to the shame experiences of students. By having a more precise understanding of the inherent problems of well-being within our disciplinary cultures, we are well-positioned to remedy these problems by 1) recognizing where faculty and administrator practices contribute to narrow, problematic expectations of students, 2) intentionally remedying these practices to create inclusive spaces that are equitable and 3) developing a heightened awareness within engineering programs to self-care (for students, faculty, and administrators). Throughout the duration of this project, alongside developing an extensive publication record of our findings, we advanced multiple national workshops to establish this needed training for engineering faculty and administrators.
Last Modified: 12/30/2021
Modified by: James L Huff
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