This special session explores the application of Chicana Feminist Epistemology methodologies in engineering education research with a focus on Latino/a/x students at Hispanic Serving Institutions. By utilizing Platicas and Testimonios as forms of data and data collection approaches in engineering education research, this session aims to foster a more inclusive and empowering research approach while challenging traditional Westernized paradigms. Through the analysis of Animaker videos created from vignettes emerging from these Platicas and Testimonios, participants will have a better understanding of the experiences of Latino/a/x engineering students, emphasizing asset-based methodologies and the creation of multimodal artifacts for research purposes. The research approaches presented in this session seek to amplify marginalized voices, promote critical consciousness, and challenge traditional ways of knowing and doing in engineering education research, encouraging attendees to integrate these methodologies into their research and teaching practices effectively to support diverse student populations.

This special session will provide an opportunity for educators to learn about critical consciousness and how to embed topics intended to promote the development of critical consciousness in the engineering design curriculum. The authors will present a critical consciousness teaching framework, which incorporates the engineering design process with critical consciousness topics through intergroup dialogue and discussion of engineering innovations. Session participants will engage in interactive activities to understand the framework, ideate how it may be adapted at their own institutions, and review case studies of challenges and affordances of using the teaching framework.

This Innovative Practice work-in-progress describes the use of collaborative autoethnography (CAE) as a methodology to explore the centrality of Whiteness (as an ideology) in engineering and how it informs the culture, climate, and discourse of engineering education. We began the first year of our project by conducting a CAE on our own experiences in engineering spaces. CAE takes a collaborative approach to the process of critical self-reflection and can be conducted in many forms, such as collecting personal memory data (e.g., journaling), interviewing each other, facilitating intentional dialogue, or observing each other (e.g., in the classroom). Our team's diverse viewpoints facilitated rich conversations that let us interrogate the ways in which Whiteness reveals its form differently depending on one's positionality and ontology. In this paper, we describe our approach, experiences, and challenges with using CAE to explore our engineering journeys. Future steps include using our findings to create a faculty development program to help engineering faculty further their development of critical consciousness. For movement towards racial equity in engineering to be effective and sustainable, we believe change must begin with action in the classroom, where engineering faculty have direct interactions and influence over students' beliefs, attitudes, and value systems.

This work in progress paper explores the historical impact of racialization and deficit ideologies on the education of Latinos/as/xs in the U.S. Southwest. It aims to provide evidence of how historical conceptualizations of race have impacted and continue to affect the education of Latino/a/x engineering students. Focusing on the research question of how racialization and whiteness influence the framing of deficit ideologies toward Latino/a/x engineering students, the larger study described here involves twelve self-identified Latino/a/x engineering sophomore and junior students from Hispanic Serving institutions (HSIs) and emerging HSIs. Testimonios were collected to uncover instances of racialization and the subsequent framing of deficit ideologies. A thematic analysis approach was used to identify emerging themes related to the forms of racialization experienced by students and the resulting educational challenges. Preliminary analysis reveals that racialization occurs in both engineering and non-engineering spaces, leading to a lack of recognition from administration, professors, and white students regarding the impacts of overt and covert whiteness that led to deficit thinking. The paper emphasizes the importance of counternarratives in engineering education and the need to validate and acknowledge the lived realities of Latino/a/x students stemming from historical racialization.

This work in progress paper analyzes the ways in which raciolinguistics can help examine the racialized ideologies existing in engineering. In this paper, we describe how raciolinguistics contributes to the analysis of the predominant practices that emerge from the confluence of linguistic, discursive, and socialization processes that lead to racialized ideologies about what counts as engineering (knowledge), who belongs in engineering (kinship), and who does engineering (legitimization). We argue that the language, the practices, the labels, the words, even the discourse – the mix of all language itself – is one of the main systemic barriers that people encounter when entering higher education in general, let alone engineering. We also provide an exploration of the potential implications for this research in helping to broaden the participations BIPOC in engineering.

This paper explores the manifestation of deficit ideologies among graduate engineering students as they prepare to become future engineering educators. The study examines the need for opportunities to participate in educational activities such as professional development in teaching and learning, curriculum development, and inclusivity training within graduate programs, specifically focusing on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students. Drawing from a case study conducted at a minority-serving research institution, analysis of classroom observations, survey data, and reflections from teaching assistants enrolled in engineering education courses revealed preliminary themes. Three key themes include: blaming students for lack of engagement, attributing lack of success to external factors, and self-blame due to perceived deficits. In order to address the challenges of how to best and most effectively educate future faculty, we argue that addressing deficit ideologies and understanding the sociocultural context of engineering education are crucial for fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion in the next generation of engineers and engineering educators.

This research-to-practice WIP paper describes the design and creation of instructional materials grounded in the engineering justice approach, as described by Leydens and Lucena, in a 16-week engineering mechanics course - statics and dynamics. The instructional materials were designed as two successive 8-week long, project-based learning (PBL) units centered around fictitious scenarios in real-world settings. The first PBL unit focused on a truss bridge project with deliverables structured around the human-centered design (HCD) process, and the second PBL unit focused on an amusement park project with deliverables structured around an engineering for social justice (ESJ) approach. Both PBL units were designed as ill-structured problems and tasked teams of students to weigh competing factors relating to economic, environmental, and sociocultural impacts to each community in order to justify a final engineering recommendation. In each PBL unit, guided reflection prompts recorded individual student attitudes and beliefs about the appropriateness in using the HCD process and ESJ approach to meet the needs of each community. The focus of this paper is on the instructional design strategy and preliminary analysis of the qualitative data. Our early observations suggest that students perceived value in the engineering for social justice approach, and they identified specific community needs rooted in economic, environmental, and sociocultural dimensions. Yet, many students struggled to connect those community needs to their engineering project efforts. This early interpretation suggests that it is viable to use the ESJ approach in an introductory engineering mechanics course to raise student awareness around social justice issues.

This work-in-progress is a critical reflection on our first offering of an energy course that reimagines what we teach and how we teach using a lens of culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSPs). As our interdisciplinary team developed and taught this class for second-year engineering students, we encountered challenges about how to best address systemic inequities in energy education in ways reflective of our own positionalities. In this WIP, we describe several missteps, illustrate how our differences in identities led to productive conflict, and reflect on our progression through deeper understanding of how to implement CSPs successfully. We conclude that critical self-reflection and acknowledging the pervasiveness of White, colonial, and masculine knowledge sources in engineering education is a necessary first step to taking an anti-racist position as an educator.

This work-in-progress exploratory study presents the perceptions and expressions of Latinx (a gender-neutral term for individuals from Latin American origins) engineers when learning about hidden curriculum (HC). HC represents the lessons learned in educational or working settings that are not necessarily communicated formally. HC is typically used to help administrators and educators to uncover the unseen or unrecognizable issues of a given environment, in an effort to identify inclusive and diverse strategies for success of their students and employees. Developing critical consciousness, or the process of gaining knowledge about the systems and institutionalized structures, developing a sense of agency, and taking action against the forces that perpetuate those structures is important when challenging the HC. In collaboration with the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), the research team served as both instructors and researchers in a professional development (PD) session to teach a group of 45 Latinx engineering faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from across the United States about how to uncover HC and strategies needed to translate these concepts in their instruction and other responsibilities as engineering educators. As a follow-up, a subset of attendees from the original PD, completed a mixed-method survey about HC. Using the frameworks of HC, engineering identity, and critical literacy, the research group analyzed the written qualitative responses. Results suggested that Latinx faculty had a slight change in their awareness about HC but mainly did not transcend to levels where critical consciousness could be achieved. Also, faculty expressed a disconnect between the culture of engineering at their institutions and their overall sense of belonging and empowerment needed to enact meaningful change.

Literacies are central to the social and cultural practices that are intertwined with identities, who gets to participate in engineering, and the knowledge that is valued in the discipline. However, identifying these literacies is not a straightforward process for engineering faculty. The purpose of this workshop is to help engineering faculty identify equity-oriented literacies that challenge hidden curriculum frameworks in engineering and influence engineering identity formation.

Engineering education scholars have pointed to the need of cultural change in engineering education. To address this need, we propose this special session about the use of one strategy that bridges research and practice and has been underutilized in engineering education - culturally responsive practices. We aim to engage the audience in discussion about culturally responsive practices via collaborate case studies. The objectives of this session are to provide a space to reflect on what culturally responsive practices can be used in K-16 engineering education, to learn more and understand better the students, and to challenge deficit models in engineering classrooms.

Engineering statics is a gateway course in engineering education that prepares students for subsequent courses such as dynamics and mechanics of materials. However, students may not explicitly voice their concerns or challenges encountered when trying to understand the material due to their unfamiliarity with engineering concepts in statics. Therefore, it is important to explore different venues that would allow the instructor to determine and understand the areas where students struggle. This work in progress investigates how web-based learning logs can help the instructor identify the information necessary to facilitate instruction, and help students understand difficult concepts regarding truss analysis. The intent of this work is to generate a framework, through constant comparative analysis, that describes the different areas engineering students struggle with when working on truss analysis. The objective is to describe the complexity of truss analysis in order to provide a series of codes and schemes that will eventually advance the research in engineering statics, and provide a better understanding of students' concerns in engineering statics to facilitate future interventions.

Enhancing a student's ability to mentally visualize and intuitively assess foundational concepts in engineering mechanics - statics can create a significant advantage for students in their pre-professional engineering courses. Concepts such as forces and moments often prove to be challenging for students lacking hands-on mechanical experience or those who are visual and kinesthetic learners. Showing students these “intangible” mechanics principles is not an easy task and usually requires proactive measures to improve learning. In an effort to improve visualization and tactile learning in a college mechanics - statics course, hands-on and visual truss models were developed based on the concept of physical manipulatives. Mathematics instructors use manipulative models to help students identify different mathematical concepts. These models not only allow the students to see and feel different objects but also to manipulate the objects to form a concrete representation of the concept. Furthermore, manipulative models help students visualize, feel, and analyze the behavior of the material being manipulated. This study examines the relationship between the use of a physical model of a truss and the students' framing of information during task interpretation to successfully attain conceptual understanding about truss analysis.