Professional Identity Development in Civil Engineering Students with Disabilities

目前可用的统计数据显示，11%至15%的美国大学生认为自己是残疾人，但很少有人研究这一群体的身份发展，更少有人探索他们在工程领域的经历。来自残疾研究和美国研究所等全国性组织的呼吁一直要求教育工作者扩大对科学、技术、工程和数学领域的参与，将残疾人包括在内。因此，这项工作是工科教育研究的迫切需要。这项研究通过使我们能够更好地了解残疾学生所经历的支持和障碍，为扩大对工程的参与奠定了基础。教育工作者将能够利用这些发现来发展包容性的教育体验，促进身份形成、多样性和普适性设计。与此同时，由于学生将被跟踪进入工作场所，这些发现可以让工程雇主在雇用残疾工程师时受益，他们再次将重点放在支持包容性和无障碍的系统和结构上。此外，该项目将通过建立伙伴关系和加强工程学内部正在进行的对话，帮助将残疾从边缘转移到中心，在工程学教育和残疾研究社区之间架起桥梁。该项目通过对土木工程专业的残疾学生进行纵向研究，满足了对“作为工程师的身份的发展及其与其他身份的交集”的研究呼吁。该项目将使用建构主义扎根理论在三年内研究两个队列。第一个队列跟踪调查了20名学生，从他们第一年的秋天到他们三年级的春天，一年两次面试(初秋和晚春)。第二个队列是同时进行的，跟踪调查了20名学生，从他们三年级的春天到他们进入职场的第一年，同样是一年两次的面试。这一方法涵盖了整个本科生的经历以及向工作的过渡，并提供了丰富的数据集，从中可以为这一群体发展身份认同形成理论。与扎根理论一致的是，该项目没有将现有的理论强加于数据；然而，对身份的理解广泛地借鉴了社会身份理论(SIT)，该理论通过比较成员彼此之间以及与属于其他群体的个人的价值观和行为而形成的群体成员身份。这种方法与现有的对大学中残疾个人的研究以及对职业身份的研究是一致的，并允许项目团队将工作置于工程中身份研究的更广泛的范围内。该项目解决了工程师职业形成研究中的一个重大空白，将土木工程中身份发展的新兴理论模型扩展到残疾学生，随着他们在学位课程中的进步和进入劳动力大军。它对工程学中的身份发展研究、工程学中的多样性和包容性研究以及高等教育中的残疾研究做出了重大贡献--迄今为止，这些问题几乎没有得到整合。纵向方法通过捕捉残疾人如何以及为什么通过这些随时间推移的变化来融合和协商个人和职业身份，从而促进了我们对本科发展的理解。然后，这项研究中开发的模型可以被其他工程领域的研究人员使用，可能还可以用于工程以外的领域，以促进对残疾学生在大学期间如何发展身份的更有力和更细微的理解。

Currently available statistics suggest that between 11 and 15% of U.S. college students identify as individuals with disabilities, yet little work addresses identity development within this population broadly, and even less explores their experiences within engineering. Calls from both disabilities studies and national organizations such as the American Institute for Research consistently ask educators to broaden participation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math fields to include individuals with disabilities. Therefore, this work targets an urgent need in engineering education research. The study lays a foundation for broadening participation in engineering by enabling us to better understand the supports and barriers students with disabilities experience. Educators will be able to use the findings to develop inclusive educational experiences that promote identity formation, diversity, and universal design. At the same time, because the students will are followed into the workplace, the findings can benefit engineering employers as they hire engineers with disabilities, again focusing on systems and structures that support inclusion and accessibility. Moreover, the project will build bridges between the engineering education and disabilities studies community by establishing partnerships and bolstering ongoing conversations within engineering that help to move disability from the margins to the center.The project addresses the call for studies on the "development of identity as an engineer and its intersection with other identities" by conducting a longitudinal study of students with disabilities in civil engineering. The project will use constructivist grounded theory to study two cohorts over three years. The first cohort follows 20 students from the fall of their first year through the spring of their junior year, with interviews twice a year (early fall and late spring). The second cohort, run concurrently, follows 20 students from spring of their junior year through their first year in the workplace, again with interviews twice a year. This approach spans the full undergraduate experience as well as the transition to work, and provides a rich data set from which to develop a theory of identity formation for this population. Consistent with grounded theory, the project does not impose an existing theory on the data; however, the understanding of identity broadly draws on social identity theory (SIT), which treats identities in terms of group membership developed through comparisons of values and behaviors members make with one another and with individuals belonging to other groups. This approach is consistent with existing studies of individuals with disabilities in college as well as with studies of professional identities, and allows the project team to situate the work within the broader landscape of identity research in engineering. The project addresses a significant gap in research on the professional formation of engineers by extending an emergent theoretical model of identity development in civil engineering to students with disabilities as they advance through their degree program and into the workforce. It provides significant contributions to research on identity development in engineering broadly, research on diversity and inclusion in engineering, and research on disability studies in higher education - issues that, to date, have seen little integration. The longitudinal approach advances our understanding of undergraduate development by capturing both how and why individuals with disabilities merge and negotiate personal and professional identities through these changes over time. The model developed in this study can then be used by researchers in other engineering fields and, potentially, beyond engineering to facilitate a more robust and nuanced understanding of how students with disabilities develop identities in college.