Research: Collaborative Research: Changing the Conversation with Humanitarian Engineering Context

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Undergraduate students with a strong engineering identity define themselves as engineers, feel that they belong in engineering, feel positively about engineering and engineers, and feel that others feel positively about engineering and engineers. Engineering identity is important because there is evidence that a lack of identification with engineering motivates students to leave the discipline despite demonstrated technical skills. This issue differentially impacts female students, who are more likely to perceive an identity mismatch between themselves and engineering. This is a nationally important problem for a variety of reasons, including strong industrial demand for engineers, research that indicates diverse teams produce more creative results, and concerns of social justice. This research tests the potential of humanitarian context to address this perceived identity mismatch. Humanitarian engineering is distinguished by its focus on vulnerable or otherwise underserved populations; for example, this could include infrastructure design and construction in disaster recovery or international development contexts. There is limited evidence that humanitarian issues disproportionately motivate female students to persist in engineering. As such, this research empirically measures whether or not humanitarian context supports engineering identity formation in undergraduate students, paying particular attention to gender. If justified by the research results, this project will create and widely disseminate an open source textbook companion for construction engineering educators at universities nationwide. This textbook companion will frame disciplinary content in humanitarian context, and will make this curricular innovation available nationwide.In this research, 650 undergraduate engineering students will experience technical engineering content framed by humanitarian, industrial, or no context. Pre- and post-tests of the students' engineering identity will be measured by existing, validated survey tools, and will be complimented by qualitative data from Describe an Engineer activities and reflection activities intended to help students build meaning from the research experience. These data will be collected through in person, online, and course based interventions. This research will build new theory, bridging the engineering education literatures in context, community engagement/service learning, and engineering identity. By reframing engineering content in terms of humanitarian outcomes, we are providing students with an alternate theorization of the nature of - or, the identity of - engineers and engineering work. This may enable us to increase the number of students who can identify with engineering and thereby open the gateway of engineering to a wider and more diverse population. Ultimately, by providing empirical evidence of the impact of humanitarian context in engineering pedagogy, this research is a step towards a more inclusive engineering curriculum.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.