Research Initiation: Understanding the Conditions for Inclusive Spaces for LGBTQ Engineering Students

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This project aims to understand the conditions that help lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) engineering students feel comfortable in their educational institutions. Engineering schools are notoriously inhospitable to LGBTQ people, with costly results for LGBTQ students and society. The emotional toll of being an LGBTQ engineer (either open or closeted) is so great that it threatens to drive LGBTQ engineers out of the field. Their departure from engineering for reasons that have nothing to do with qualification only makes the field more homogenous and therefore less creative, innovative, and risk-taking, at the same time diminishing a population that is already underrepresented in engineering. While researchers understand the conventions of engineering culture that can damage non-heterosexual engineering students and engineers, they still know very little about how engineering cultures can support these same engineers. This project builds on a campus climate survey conducted at an engineering institution with a notable population of openly LGBTQ engineering students. In interviews and other research methods, the research team is identifying the elements of the most inclusive and supportive spaces in order to develop ways to extend these elements into engineering classrooms and other formal learning experiences. To understand the conditions that support lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) engineering students and to examine how they prepare students to lead positive change, an interdisciplinary team of humanists and engineers are collaborating in professional development to learn the theoretical foundations of 21st-century theories of mind, focusing on how cognition is tied to bodily experience. In contrast to much engineering culture that separates the personal from engineering content and methods, this team begins with the assumption that knowledge is as complex as lived experience, with engineers being both mental and physical, individual and connected, free and determined. Beginning with recent data from a 2016 campus climate survey, this study is exploring the findings more deeply through individual and focus group interviews with LGBTQ engineering students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a medium-sized engineering college with a relatively large number of openly LGBTQ students. These interviews are helping the research team learn in some detail about the experiences of LGBTQ engineering students, probing whether and how a traditional or project-based engineering curriculum can contribute to LGBTQ students' experiences and developing models for other schools to adopt in classes and projects. The research team is identifying those practices and spaces that are most conducive to the growth, success, and self-confidence of LGBTQ engineers, as well as understanding how their professional formation (along many axes including sexual identity) transpires. In identifying those experiences, opportunities, and practices that are most supportive of LGBTQ engineering students, the research is also identifying the same experiences that help develop the emotional intelligence and cross-cultural sensitivity and communication that will support all engineers, including but not exclusively other underrepresented populations. Using the principle of universal design, this project is piloting educational interventions to support all forms of diversity in engineering education.