STORIESSTories of Resilience and Inclusion of Engineering Students
STORIESFor many of us, it’s been a long time since we were engineering students, and our own experiences may not be reflective of what current students are going through. The STRIDE Research Group believes this website can be a valuable resource for faculty to gain insight into what it’s like to be an engineering student today. These stories are more detailed than what instructors may get through conversations in class or office hours. Below, we list a few tags that may be specifically useful to faculty and instructors. We also provide some definition and background information if you are interested in the theoretical foundation of our work. Feel free to contact us if you are interested in collaborating!
If you want to learn more about the project, then these concepts and definitions may be useful.
Latent diversity refers to a students’ underlying attitudes, mindsets, and beliefs that contribute to an innovative mindset and engineering identity. These attitudes can’t be seen, which is why we call them latent or underlying. They are also things that students bring with them into engineering that may or may not be valued by faculty or other students. As we work to create more inclusive engineering environments we want to make sure that engineering culture recognizes and supports these diverse ways of being, thinking, and knowing. You can learn more about how we use latent diversity in this project through this video.
Identity Trajectory Theory (ITT) is a theory about how students come to see themselves as particular types of professionals. The theory was developed for graduate students, and the STRIDE research team has adapted this theory to an undergraduate context. Lynn McAlpine, one of the creators of ITT, was even on our advisory board, to help make the translation. ITT looks at three ways in which identity can be shaped: institutional contexts, interests, and networks. You can learn more about Identity Trajectory Theory in an article from Dr. McAlpine and about how we use ITT in our study here.
Narrative Inquiry is a methodology, or a guiding approach to doing research, that focuses on the ways in which people make stories out of their experiences. Over the course of our interviews with our student participants, we had the opportunity to hear lots of their stories. We’ve used the STORIES project to present portions of these interviews that may be useful to students and instructors. Check out this article to learn more about different ways of using narrative inquiry.
Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is a type of clustering analysis, meaning it tries to identify groups of people with similar measurements, as well as shows relationships between groups. TDA has been used in all types of contexts, including basketball players and politicians. We used it with our quantitative data to identify clusters of engineering students, and then used the identified clusters to select students for our interviews (and thus inclusion in this site). To learn more about how we used TDA in this project, check out our paper detailing our process and our results!
Curious about a term we didn’t define here? Send us an email through the contact page and let us know!