Learning from Practitioners That Support Underrepresented Students in Engineering
Publication: Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice
Volume 144, Issue 2
Abstract
Creating an inclusive and supportive learning environment is challenging due to the range of issues faced by diverse students. To facilitate efforts to help students, it is important that educators understand the factors that influence their ability to effectively offer support. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the concepts that underpin student support efforts in engineering. The authors address this purpose by investigating the beliefs of student support practitioners that regularly work with students from underrepresented groups. The authors used prevailing student development theory to analyze data from 17 interviews with student support practitioners across four universities. The findings suggest that there are four major themes that inform the decision making of student support practitioners: (1) context, (2) agency, (3) process, and (4) impact. Taken together, these concepts provide an organizing framework for advancing understanding about supporting underrepresented students in engineering.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Mayra Artiles, Cynthia Hampton, Ashley Taylor, and Sreyoshi Bhaduri for their perceptive feedback on an earlier draft of this paper. The authors thank Holly Matusovich for her sustained involvement through the research design and data collection process. This study is based on work partially supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Published In
Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice
Volume 144 • Issue 2 • April 2018
Copyright
©2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 1, 2017
Accepted: Sep 7, 2017
Published online: Dec 23, 2017
Published in print: Apr 1, 2018
Discussion open until: May 23, 2018
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