Community Cultures: Broadening Participation By Understanding How Rural Communities Support Engineering as College Major Choice

强大而多样化的工程劳动力对国家安全和经济竞争力至关重要，目前高等教育工程入学率不足以支持这一需求。因此，扩大代表性不足的群体对工程的参与是一个至关重要的优先事项。为了满足这一需要，该项目侧重于经济上处于不利地位的农村学生，特别是妇女和其他代表性不足的群体。传统的职业选择模式强调兴趣是职业选择的主要驱动力，但在农村环境中，社区价值观、当地经济驱动力和强大的家庭网络往往发挥着关键作用。因此，该项目将重点从学生个人转移到社区本身，以了解关键利益相关者和组织如何支持农村青年的职业选择。有了这些知识，调查人员将使目标农村社区参与参与设计研讨会，以便他们可以利用其独特的社区资产来支持更多的年轻人，特别是代表性不足的群体，追求工程事业。该项目首先对来自选定的农村高中的本科工程专业学生进行焦点小组和个人访谈，这些高中以培养大量工程专业而闻名。这些数据奠定了与学生的家庭社区的主要成员和显着的程序或事件的观察访谈的基础，以提供每个社区的信仰，经验和价值观的丰富的理解。数据分析包括案例内分析和跨案例分析。此外，多案例研究的结果将用于指导与该地区通常不产生工程专业的农村学校和社区的参与式设计研讨会。这些讲习班将促进对话，探讨支持或阻碍将做法转移到低产量学校的因素，并确定政策和战略，以提高每个社区的能力，更好地支持工程作为一种潜在的职业选择。这项研究以阿巴拉契亚山脉的弗吉尼亚州西南部地区为主要研究对象，但对农村学生职业选择的研究通常表明，研究结果和方法具有潜在的可移植性。该项目通过捕捉社区成员的观点来推进有关工程职业选择和农村教育的知识，这些社区成员通常在学生的职业和学术决策中发挥关键作用，特别是在农村社区。

A robust and diverse engineering workforce is essential to national security and economic competitiveness, and current rates of higher education enrollment in engineering are not sufficient to support the need. Thus, broadening participation in engineering from underrepresented groups is a critical priority. To meet this need, this project focuses on economically disadvantaged rural students, particularly women and other underrepresented groups. Traditional models of career choice stressing interest as a primary career choice driver break down in rural contexts, where instead community values, local economic drivers, and strong family networks often play a critical role. As a result, this project shifts the focus from individual students to the communities themselves to understand how key stakeholders and organizations support the career choices of rural youth. With this knowledge, the investigators will engage target rural communities in participatory design workshops so that they might leverage their unique community assets to support more of their youth, particularly underrepresented groups, to pursue engineering careers. The project begins with focus group and individual interviews with undergraduate engineering students from selected rural high schools that are known for producing high numbers of engineering majors. These data lay the foundation for interviews with key members of students' home communities and observations of salient programs or events to provide a rich understanding of the beliefs, experiences, and values of each community. Data analysis includes both within-case and cross case analysis. Further, the results of the multi-case study will be used to guide participatory design workshops with rural schools and communities in the region that do not typically produce engineering majors. These workshops will foster dialogue that explores factors that support or hinder transfer of practices to low-producing schools and identifies policies and strategies that would enhance each community's ability to better support engineering as a potential career choice. The study uses the southwestern region of Virginia, in the Appalachian Mountains, as its primary focus, but research on career choice among rural students generally points to the potential transferability of the findings and methods. This project advances knowledge about engineering career choice and rural education by capturing the perspectives of community members who often play key roles in students' career and academic decisions, particularly in rural communities.