Research: Engineering for Social Justice: Factors shaping the career aspirations and mindsets of humanitarian engineers

人道主义工程（HE）计划旨在培训工程师，以改善服务不足和边缘化社区的健康，繁荣和福利。他是越来越多的学生所期望的，并有可能招募社会关注的学生和学生从代表性不足的少数群体工程;然而，有这些学生入学后的职业道路的研究有限。此外，非殖民化和社会正义改革正在改变高等教育部门，有必要了解职业前景，包括自我效能，结果预期，职业兴趣，与社会正义改革的一致性，以及在该部门的保留，正在发生变化。该项目将描述职业抱负和期望，并确定影响职业道路和社会正义价值体系发展的因素和经验。与高等教育从业者的反应比较将有助于确定学生的期望和目标如何与从业者的现实一致或不一致。因此，该项目将描述职业道路，以帮助学生了解毕业后的潜在职业和该行业所需的技能。此外，该项目还将为高等教育项目和高等教育部门提供基于研究的建议，确定能够促进社会正义的工程学学习经验，并为高等教育部门可以采取的行动提供反思，以留住和支持具有社会意识的工程实践者。该项目将纵向研究美国八个高等教育研究生课程的学生。 该项目将侧重于职业前景，包括职业抱负，期望和自我效能。与此同时，我们认识到社会正义运动如何影响全球工程领域，为具有社会意识的工程专业学生开辟了新的考虑因素和途径，这些考虑因素和途径可能与该领域目前的机会不一致。为了捕捉这些实时变化，并确定学生的社会意识的职业目标如何与现场现实相一致，我们将使用混合方法，纵向数据来记录这些职业前景如何随着时间的推移而变化，以及影响这些职业前景和变化的因素。纵向数据将包括每学期与学生进行的访谈，调查问卷，以及由研究团队维护的HE特定在线社区的定期讨论。与高等教育从业者进行的访谈分析，并与学生的反应进行比较，将揭示（错误）职业前景和现实之间的对齐。该项目不仅将描述职业轨迹，而且还将推进工程价值体系发展理论。此外，通过在社会正义改革时期收集易腐数据，该项目还将建立关于社会正义运动和心态如何有助于工程学生的观点和心态的理论。一个由高等教育研究生课程教师组成的专家咨询委员会将帮助进一步传播项目成果。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得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来支持。

Humanitarian Engineering (HE) programs aim to train engineers to improve the health, prosperity, and welfare of underserved and marginalized communities. HE is increasingly desired by students and has the potential to recruit socially attentive students and students from underrepresented minority groups to engineering; however, there is limited research on the career paths of these students after admission. Further, decolonization and social justice reforms are changing the HE sector, and there is a need to understand how career outlooks, including self-efficacy, outcome expectations, career interests, alignment with social justice reform, and retention in the sector, are changing. This project will characterize career aspirations and expectations and identify factors and experiences that influence career pathways and the development of social justice value systems. Comparisons with responses from HE practitioners will help determine how student expectations and goals align or misalign with practitioner reality. As a result, this project will characterize career pathways to help inform students of potential careers post-graduation and needed skill sets in the sector. Additionally, the project will create research-based recommendations for HE educational programs and the sector, identify learning experiences that enable engineering for social justice, and provide reflection for actions that can be taken in the HE sector to retain and support socially-minded engineering practitioners.This project will longitudinally study students from eight HE graduate programs in the United States. The project will focus on career outlooks, including career aspirations, expectations, and self-efficacy. At the same time, we recognize how social justice movements are impacting the field of global engineering, opening up new considerations and pathways for socially minded engineering students that may or may not be aligned with current opportunities in the field. In order to capture these real-time changes and to determine how students’ socially minded career goals align with field realities, we will use mixed-method, longitudinal data to record how these career outlooks change over time and the factors that influence these career outlooks and changes. Longitudinal data will include interviews conducted with students each term, survey questionnaires, and regular discussions in a HE-specific online community maintained by the research team. Analysis of interviews conducted with HE practitioners and compared with student responses will reveal (mis)alignments between career outlooks and realities. The project will not only characterize career trajectories but also advance theory of engineering value system development. Further, by collecting perishable data in this time of social justice reform, the project will also build theory on how social justice movements and mindsets contribute to engineering student outlooks and mindsets. An expert advisory board of faculty from HE graduate programs will help further disseminate results for uptake in programs.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.