Rethinking engineering education through a focus on identity, funds of knowledge, and belongingness

Abstract

Engineering education has been rooted for years in a society that tends to neglect several student groups who are not a part of the dominant culture. A history of how engineering education has developed will demonstrate mindsets and institutional structures established that have hindered students’ decision to pursue engineering and their ability to be successful in engineering. This trend has produced a broad variety of literature, initially that has highlighted this factor as a deficit for students not a part of the dominant culture, but more recently that has started to research how these students can utilize certain tools and mindsets that they do possess to reverse this trend. Additionally, there has been an initiation of how engineering education can reform to start including these tools and mindsets in how academics teach engineering. Ideas range from broadening curriculum in a way that resonates with many student groups and embraces different structures that don’t solely focus on concept knowledge, but also creating the best environment for students to be successful holistically.

This thesis furthers the assets-based perspective on how engineering can encompass several concepts and infuse them within curriculum and structure to change the narrative for who is not successful in engineering. The specific concepts this paper will focus on are identity, funds of knowledge, and belongingness, just a few of the many themes research has pinpointed in playing a role in student success. Through a qualitative analysis, this paper relies on data from semi-structured interviews, surveys, and previous literature to understand how these themes can be incorporated into engineering curriculum and structure, focusing on student groups in which the common narrative has highlighted deficits within engineering. The main student group this paper highlights are first-generation college students.

A first-generation identity is explored through the lens of community cultural wealth, looking at how different students use their identity as an asset by producing a mindset that causes them to persist in their engineering education. Based on their experiences, different educational tools are suggested that utilize the wealth from their first-generation identities. The assets acquired through the backgrounds of first-generation college students are demonstrated through a short educational video, accompanied by an instructional module. These assets are called funds of knowledge and are tools these students can use to scaffold their engineering learning and be successful in their profession. Lastly, themes are discussed from a group of undergraduate engineering students experience from an immersive, sociotechnical, field-based engineering field session that focuses on their sense of belongingness before and after the field session. Sense of belongingness is considered in a variety of spaces, such as the profession of engineering, the engineering institution, the students’ respective majors, their faculty, their peers, and the engineering classroom. Because students’ overall sense of belongingness for the various contexts decreased following the field session, different discussion points, future work, and curriculum ideas are suggested that could be beneficial for increasing sense of belongingness.