RFE Design and Development: Framing Engineering as Community Activism for Values-Driven Engineering

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Several southern states, including Alabama, are transitioning to a more manufacturing-focused economy that requires a larger engineering workforce. The results of this research will provide a framework for interventions that encourage more students from minority, urban, and low-SES contexts to pursue engineering career pathways. It will also provide insights into how to motivate and increase retention of undergraduate minority engineering students, and increase the number of socially engaged engineers. The goal of this research is to understand how framing engineering as an altruistic (pro-social) profession affects the career identity development of students from low-socioeconomic status and African American families who are enrolled in 8th - 10th grade in an urban area within a predominantly rural Southern state. An additional goal is understanding of how serving as a mentor in the program affects the engineering career identity of undergraduate engineering students from similar backgrounds. The focal population of students offer the largest untapped source of future engineers available in this region. In an iterative process, the career identity of students from this demographic participating in an existing informal science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education program will be explored. These findings to develop a yearlong "Help Your Community and Your World program that highlights the societal impact of engineering and provides undergraduate engineering student mentors/role models from similar backgrounds. Designing and implementing this program will lead to improved understanding of how career identity develops for these students. This work has the potential to impact the number and diversity of U.S. students entering the engineering workforce and facilitate a manufacturing and STEM workforce development and economic base in states that have historically had agricultural economic base and/or lower STEM workforce needs.The research will use a mixed methods design with a heavy emphasis on qualitative data collection in the form of video (or other multimedia) reflections, and interviews. Quantitative data will be collected through surveys of student attitudes towards STEM, beliefs about their ability in STEM, and intentions to study STEM in the future. For the qualitative approach, we will use the Consensual Qualitative research approach with its emphasis on team-built understandings of interview data. A student-centered approach will be taken in order to understand how students make sense of and come to understand their intersecting, and socially constructed identities. For the newly developed summer camp, the data will be analyzed in three stages: before the camp, during the camp, and after the camp. This will be done to create a snapshot of the students' career identities and perceptions of engineering at each time point. This will also help the researchers examine and compare how their definitions, goals, and identities altered throughout the camp. Then the findings from each snapshot will be collapsed together to identify the larger overarching themes from the data. This method allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the students' own meaning making about their career identities as they progress through the program, and what aspects of the program were salient for the students, and how interventions can better support identity development in students. The interview and survey data will be qualitatively analyzed and triangulated to identity underlying themes and repeated patterns in the data. The results will be disseminated in hands on workshops of regional teachers and out of school facilitators as well as through traditional mechanisms such as publications and conference presentations.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.