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Engaging in STEM Education Equity Work Through a Course: Studying Race, Class, and Gender Theory in Engineering Education

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Conference

2019 CoNECD - The Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity

Location

Crystal City, Virginia

Publication Date

April 14, 2019

Start Date

April 14, 2019

End Date

April 22, 2019

Conference Session

Track: Learning Spaces, Pedagogy, and Curriculum Design Technical Session I

Tagged Topics

Diversity and Learning Spaces, Pedagogy & Curriculum Design

Page Count

21

DOI

10.18260/1-2--31757

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/31757

Download Count

535

Paper Authors

biography

Tikyna M. Dandridge Purdue University, West Lafayette

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Tikyna is a doctoral student in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University.

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Hassan Ali Al Yagoub Purdue University, West Lafayette Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-8812-4109

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Hassan Al Yagoub is a Ph.D. student in Engineering Education at Purdue University. His research interests include diversity & inclusion, advising and mentoring, students’ persistence, engineering career pathways, and school-to-work transition of new engineers.
He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.
Prior to beginning his doctoral studies, Hassan worked for five years at General Electric where he graduated from their Edison Engineering Development Program (EEDP) and then worked as a gas turbine fleet management engineer. In addition to his technical role, Hassan supported the recruiting, interview, and selection process of the EEDP Program, where he mentored interns, co-ops and Edison associates from the Middle East and Africa regions by developing and teaching a technical training curriculum, providing guidance for graduate school applications, and providing career consultation.

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Sharlane Cleare Purdue University, West Lafayette

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Justin Charles Major Purdue University, West Lafayette Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-3111-8509

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Justin C. Major is a second-year Engineering Education Ph.D student and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at Purdue University. Prior to graduate school, he completed Bachelor's degrees in both Mechanical Engineering and Secondary Mathematics Education at the University of Nevada, Reno with a focus on K-12 Engineering Education. Justin's research and service focuses on the experiences and attitudinal development of low-socioeconomic students. Through his work, he hopes he can bring light to the importance of considering socioeconomic status in research on diversity.

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Shalin Lena Raye Purdue University, West Lafayette

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Casey E. Wright Purdue University, West Lafayette

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Alice L. Pawley Purdue University, West Lafayette Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-9117-4855

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Alice L. Pawley is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering Education and an affiliate faculty member in the Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies Program and the Division of Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University. Prof. Pawley's goal through her work at Purdue is to help people, including the engineering education profession, develop a vision of engineering education as more inclusive, engaged, and socially just. She runs the Feminist Research in Engineering Education (FREE, formerly RIFE, group), whose diverse projects and group members are described at feministengineering.org. She received a CAREER award in 2010 and a PECASE award in 2012 for her project researching the stories of undergraduate engineering women and men of color and white women. She has received ASEE-ERM’s best paper award for her CAREER research, and the Denice Denton Emerging Leader award from the Anita Borg Institute, both in 2013. She was co-PI of Purdue’s ADVANCE program from 2008-2014, focusing on the underrepresentation of women in STEM faculty positions. She helped found, fund, and grow the PEER Collaborative, a peer mentoring group of early career and recently tenured faculty and research staff primarily evaluated based on their engineering education research productivity. She can be contacted by email at apawley@purdue.edu.

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Abstract

Each of the authors are currently enrolled as students or serving as an instructor in a graduate-level engineering education course which is cross-listed with the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program at a large research university in the Midwest. Through engagement with podcasts, readings, reflection, and discussion with others, this course seeks to help participants explore theories of race, class, and gender in engineering education, and how they can be applied in research and practice. Each of the involved authors occupy different disciplinary locations in the educational equity research space, including engineering education, technology education, chemistry education, and multicultural education. Additionally, each author holds different social identities such as: students who are of color and/or white, students who are from domestic or international backgrounds, students who are from diverse socioeconomic and sociocultural upbringings, and students of various gender identities. Within the associated presentation, the authors share how the course has influenced their personal and academic positions, and how it informed their research. Each author presents their research interests; how they have included race, class, and gender in their work before taking the course, if at all; and how participating in an open and safe educational environment may have affected their research directions. Each has completed a reflection of how they have uniquely engaged with theories of race, class, gender, and contemporary theories of change as frameworks for the basis of their assertions. As the next generation of scholars, the authors emphasize the importance of thoughtful theorizing of race, class, and gender in all research across STEM education disciplines, and beyond, and encourage others to find meaningful opportunities to do the same.

Dandridge, T. M., & Al Yagoub, H. A., & Cleare, S., & Major, J. C., & Raye, S. L., & Wright, C. E., & Pawley, A. L. (2019, April), Engaging in STEM Education Equity Work Through a Course: Studying Race, Class, and Gender Theory in Engineering Education Paper presented at 2019 CoNECD - The Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity , Crystal City, Virginia. 10.18260/1-2--31757

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2019 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015