Professional Identity Development in Civil Engineering Students with Disabilities

目前可用的统计数据表明，11%至15%的美国大学生认为自己是残疾人，但很少有工作广泛地解决这一人群中的身份发展问题，更少探索他们在工程领域的经验。来自残疾研究和美国研究所等国家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，以包括残疾人。因此，开展这项工作是工程教育研究的迫切需要。这项研究奠定了基础，扩大参与工程，使我们能够更好地了解残疾学生的支持和障碍的经验。教育工作者将能够利用研究结果来开发包容性的教育经验，促进身份形成，多样性和通用设计。与此同时，由于学生将被跟踪进入工作场所，研究结果可以使工程雇主受益，因为他们雇用残疾工程师，再次关注支持包容性和无障碍性的系统和结构。此外，通过建立伙伴关系，加强工程学领域的对话，将工程学教育与残疾人研究界联系起来，帮助残疾人从边缘走向中心。通过对土木工程专业的残疾学生进行纵向研究，响应“工程师身份的发展及其与其他身份的交叉”研究的号召。该项目将使用建构主义扎根理论研究两个队列超过三年。第一组研究对象是20名学生，从大一的秋季到大三的春季，每年接受两次采访（初秋和春末）。第二批研究是同时进行的，跟踪调查了20名学生，从他们大三的春天到他们第一年工作的地方，同样每年进行两次采访。这种方法跨越了整个本科生的经验，以及过渡到工作，并提供了丰富的数据集，从中开发出一个理论的身份形成这一人口。与扎根理论相一致，该项目并没有将现有的理论强加于数据;然而，对身份的理解广泛借鉴了社会身份理论（SIT），该理论通过比较成员之间以及与属于其他群体的个人之间的价值观和行为来发展群体成员身份。这种方法是符合现有的研究残疾人在大学，以及与专业身份的研究，并允许项目团队在工程身份研究的更广泛的景观内的工作。该项目解决了工程师的专业形成研究的一个显着差距，通过扩展土木工程中的身份发展的新兴理论模型，残疾学生，因为他们通过他们的学位课程，并进入劳动力市场。它提供了显着的贡献，广泛的工程身份发展的研究，多样性和包容性的工程研究，并在高等教育中的残疾研究的研究-问题，迄今为止，已经看到很少的整合。纵向方法通过捕捉残疾人如何以及为什么合并和谈判，通过这些变化随着时间的推移，个人和职业身份，推进我们对本科生发展的理解。在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，并且可能超越工程，以促进对残疾学生如何在大学中发展身份的更强大和细致入微的理解。

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.