COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: We are thriving: Challenging negative discourse through voices of women in project teams

合作研究：我们正在蓬勃发展：通过项目团队中女性的声音挑战负面言论

• 批准号: 2015741
• 负责人: Richard Evans
• 金额: $ 11.8万
• 依托单位: Cornell University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-09-15 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2015741&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: COLLABORATIVE; RESEARCH; thriving; Challenging; negative

The goal of this research is to understand women who are thriving (i.e., developing and succeeding) in engineering student project teams and undergraduate engineering programs. Project teams are extra-curricular, student-led, engineering design teams. One important aspect of this research is that these thriving women are encouraged to speak for themselves, describe their own experiences, and tell their own stories. Another is the intentional focus on women who are doing well, feeling positive about themselves as engineers and about their professional futures. Currently, the number of women who pursue engineering degrees remains low, around 20%, despite over 40 years of research. Previous researchers have provided valuable frameworks to explain the low participation and retention of women, but these projects have focused on what may be wrong -- why women do not select engineering or why they decide to leave engineering. While important, this type of research may inadvertently encourage women to avoid engineering as it may propagate the message that they “do not belong”. This research adopts a novel approach to explore a new direction toward understanding women’s experiences in engineering and employs an asset-based approach in its attempt to identify what women find rewarding. Therefore, a fresh and quite possibly transformative understanding of women’s engagement in engineering is anticipated. The primary deliverable will be a perspective and specific actionable items that can be adopted by university engineering programs and engineering companies that will encourage greater participation of women in engineering, and also suggest how those programs and companies might create an environment in which women can thrive. The broader impacts of this research include (1) increasing gender equity in engineering; (2) engaging a diverse range of women participants; and (3) suggesting alternative pathways toward engineering degrees and careers in engineering. Each of these broader impacts will contribute to a long-term goal of changing the negative discourse regarding the persistence of the underrepresentation of women and minorities in engineering.This research asks and answers the research question: what are the personal and institutional factors that facilitate women who thrive in engineering student project teams? The research approach is to conduct a series of three semi-structured interviews with women project team leaders at Kansas State University, Cornell University, and University of Nevada Las Vegas. These partnering universities vary by location, size, type, and ability to attract and retain women in engineering. The interviews include their life history or how they understand their life-experiences in relation to engineering; learning journey or how their experiences in project teams has led them to identify as engineers; and PhotoVoice, an approach which places students behind a camera, such that they can document and explain those project team experiences to others and in their own terms. The aim is to learn about the positive experiences of these women, identified and explained by the women themselves, thereby enabling a better understanding and appreciation of those experiences. Additional interviews with women at other institutions, engineering leadership, and project team faculty advisers will inform the understanding of the roles project teams play in broadening engagement in engineering. These interview data, together with secondary, document-based contextual data, will be analyzed to identify positive engineering experiences and then will be used to create a theoretical framework for encouraging thriving. The research offers the prospect for a new, targeted and more positive focus regarding women’s participation in engineering. The results of this research will be included on a website created by an undergraduate student project team to maximize dissemination, long-term accessibility, and project sustainability.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.

这项研究的目标是了解在工程学生项目团队和本科工程项目中蓬勃发展（即发展和成功）的女性。项目团队是课外的、由学生领导的工程设计团队。这项研究的一个重要方面是，这些成功的女性被鼓励为自己说话，描述自己的经历，讲述自己的故事。另一个原因是有意关注表现出色的女性，她们对自己作为工程师的身份和职业前景感到乐观。目前，尽管有40多年的研究，但攻读工程学位的女性人数仍然很低，约为20%。以前的研究人员提供了有价值的框架来解释女性的低参与度和保留率，但这些项目都集中在可能的问题上——为什么女性不选择工程或为什么她们决定离开工程。虽然很重要，但这种类型的研究可能会无意中鼓励女性避开工程学，因为它可能会传播这样的信息：她们“不属于这里”。本研究采用了一种新颖的方法来探索理解女性在工程领域经验的新方向，并采用基于资产的方法来尝试确定女性认为值得的东西。因此，对女性参与工程的全新的、很可能是变革性的理解是值得期待的。主要成果将是一个观点和具体的可操作项目，可以被大学工程项目和工程公司采用，以鼓励女性更多地参与工程，并建议这些项目和公司如何创造一个女性可以茁壮成长的环境。本研究的广泛影响包括：(1)增加工程领域的性别平等；(2)吸引各种各样的女性参与者；(3)建议获得工程学位和从事工程职业的其他途径。这些更广泛的影响将有助于改变关于女性和少数民族在工程领域持续代表性不足的负面话语的长期目标。这项研究提出并回答了一个研究问题：是什么个人因素和制度因素促使女性在工程学生项目团队中茁壮成长？研究方法是对堪萨斯州立大学、康奈尔大学和内华达大学拉斯维加斯分校的女性项目团队负责人进行一系列的三次半结构化访谈。这些合作大学在地理位置、规模、类型和吸引和留住工程领域女性的能力方面各不相同。访谈内容包括他们的生活史，或者他们如何理解与工程相关的生活经历；学习历程或他们在项目团队中的经历如何使他们成为工程师；PhotoVoice是一种让学生站在相机后面的方法，这样他们就可以用自己的方式记录和解释这些项目团队的经历。其目的是了解这些妇女的积极经历，这些经历由妇女自己确定和解释，从而能够更好地理解和欣赏这些经历。与其他机构的女性、工程领导和项目团队教师顾问的额外访谈将有助于了解项目团队在扩大工程参与方面所起的作用。这些访谈数据，连同次要的、基于文件的上下文数据，将被分析以确定积极的工程经验，然后将被用来创建一个理论框架，以鼓励蓬勃发展。这项研究为女性参与工程提供了一个新的、有针对性的、更积极的关注。这项研究的结果将包含在一个由本科生项目团队创建的网站上，以最大限度地传播，长期可访问性和项目可持续性。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。