This research, full paper examines the impact of introducing asset-based perspectives on faculty mental models of teaching and learning through participation in a Community of Practice. Ongoing research at California State University, Los Angeles is exploring how faculty perspectives are affected after participating in a community of practice intended to promote asset-based thinking towards students. This research challenges the factory-based framing of engineering education and advocates for an ecosystem model, where all participants-students, faculty, and staff-recognize their interdependence and embrace authenticity. This paper is based on qualitative data from minute papers, or participant reflections. Through inductive qualitative coding of this data, the research team has developed a code book with themes around Insights into Mindsets and Critical Points regarding understanding asset-based perspectives. Our results, contribute to the conversation about changing mental models, by tracing the journey of different faculty as they learn about asset-based perspective, process their learning through discussion and application, and how introducing this different framework affects faculty perspectives on students. This conversation is particularly important as we continue to create more inclusive classrooms, especially when faculty and students have differing experiences, based on different social identities (e.g. different racial/ethnic identities, socioeconomic status, gender identity). The contributions will also include implications for practice as we understand how faculty consider asset-based perspectives.

This work-in-progress research paper investigates undergraduate aerospace engineering students’ perceptions of macroethics issues and education. Macroethics refers to the real-world ethical implications of engineering technology and the collective social responsibility of the engineering profession. Over the past two years, our research team, consisting of undergraduate students, engineering education researchers, and aerospace teaching faculty, have developed and implemented a one-day introductory macroethics lesson in a required sophomore aerospace engineering course at the University of Colorado Boulder, a large, public, research-intensive university in the Western U.S. One of our motivations for offering this macroethics lesson is our hypothesis that students are aware of macroethical issues in aerospace engineering but feel that their undergraduate education ignores these issues. This paper is a first attempt to gather data to investigate that hypothesis through an anonymous survey given to undergraduate aerospace engineering students. In this paper, we present initial analyses of our quantitative survey data as a basis for discussion with the engineering education research community. These results, along with future analyses and survey refinements, will inform future iterations of the macroethics lesson and motivate the need for the integration of macroethics across the aerospace curriculum.

The authors present a Full Paper in the Innovative Practice category. Their work describes and reflects upon the development of guidelines governing interactions within a critically reflective educational space. The Class Community Norms were co-developed by the instructor and students in an undergraduate course required for Integrated Engineering majors on the intersections of engineering and social justice during the Fall 2021 semester. The course aimed to challenge and build alternatives to existing structures of individual and systemic dominance within engineering and engineering education rooted in heteropatriarchy, racism, colonialism, and the classism that is inherent to capitalism. The intentional establishment of the space was paramount due to the course’s focus on critical conversation and collaborative group work that challenged established norms within engineering spaces.While it is increasingly common practice for teachers, facilitators, and social activists to intentionally initialize collaborative spaces with lists of norms (also sometimes called "guidelines" or "ground rules"), the exercise can sometimes be superficial, unidirectional, and fleeting, lacking any form of reflection upon implementation. It is also important to note that this practice is not common in any form within engineering or STEM education. Alternatively, the instructor and students collaboratively constructed, reflected upon, and continually revised the Class Community Norms throughout the duration of the course. In light of a critical pedagogical framework, this work was done with explicitly-stated goals of recognizing and deconstructing social hierarchies and promoting growth-orientated learning.The resulting Class Community Norms - norms related to learning, communication, teamwork, and accountability - are presented herein. The pedagogical methodology used for the development of, reflection on, and revision to the Class Community Norms is included for the use of instructors and practitioners in engineering education, STEM education, and elsewhere. The authors (who are the instructor and several students from the class) also put forth their personal reflections on the implementation of the project, addressing their individual experiences, difficulties they encountered, and the impact of their social positionalities. Finally, recommendations are made for the ongoing development of this practice with the goal of constructing spaces that are critical, collaborative, growth-oriented, and promote individual and collective accountability. The authorship team encourages the use and refinement of the Class Community Norms practice within engineering educational spaces to promote discussion and collaboration that challenges existing structures of dominance within engineering education.

The authors present a Work-In-Progress paper in the Innovative Practice category on the ongoing development of tools for faculty in STEM higher education to construct supportive educational environments within their classrooms. The tools consist of a peer observation form and the associated process, a resource repository, and a student survey. They are components of the Eco-STEM project that aims to initiate institutional change through the embrace of a metaphorical "ecosystem" model of education.Together, the Eco-STEM Tools support an integrated system of pedagogical reflection and growth for the development of healthy STEM classroom-based ecosystems. While the project team is developing these tools within the context of a majority-minority institution, we believe they would be impactful at any institution that strives to support its marginalized students – as well as support the thriving of every actor within the ecosystem.

The authors present a Full Paper in the Research-To-Practice category. Educational institutions are increasingly looking toward diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as a means of addressing inequities with regards to student representation rates and outcomes. We recognize that the field of engineering was historically designed and continues to operate for the benefit of straight, cis, white, affluent men. Often, institutions offer supplemental programming to students who do not embody this set of identities as a means of support, seeking to more effectively integrate them into fundamentally inequitable structures. Typically, due to the top-down nature of this supplemental programming, it presents additional barriers to challenging the existence of these structures or empowering students to enact equity-centered change. Alternatively, we sought to design a program for marginalized engineering students that reduced barriers to the expression of their whole selves, including the value of their identities within the engineering educational space. Applying critical and liberative theoretical frameworks, we invited marginalized students to organize within themselves to enact changes to even the most fundamental aspects of the existing educational structure. This program, the Undergraduate Engineering Collaborative Growth Series, was implemented at a large, prestigious research university in the United States and monetarily paid students for the labor associated with their participation. It consisted of a series of workshops that aimed to support the development of a community that recognized commonalities across experiences and organized to meet their collective needs. This paper discusses the methods used to recruit and select participants for the series as well as outlines facilitation and data collection methods. The collected data forms the basis for ongoing research. In the future, we hope to expand the program to reach more students in more programs at more institutions. In doing so, the intention is to support the empowerment of marginalized students, the best experts in their own experiences, to connect forms of power to action that disrupts the barriers currently preventing them from expressing their whole, authentic selves within engineering academia.

The authors present a Research Full Paper on the application of critical and liberative theories in understanding the disproportionately low student outcomes of marginalized undergraduate students studying engineering at a large, highly selective public university in the United States. In addition to looking at women students and students of color, we also examine the effects of social class on educational opportunity and performance, hypothesizing that access to financial capital is correlated to student success. In recognition of class-related structural oppression, this study introduces the framework of Freirean critical theory and other anti-oppressive frameworks as lenses through which we observe and analyze student experiences and outcomes.We pursue a quantitative study in which we investigate engineering student outcomes based on reported gender, ethnicity, and household income level. Dependent variables include degree completion rates, time to graduation, and grade point average after the first four semesters of study. We find that students of color and working class students experience lower rates of graduation, prolonged time to degree, and lower grade point averages than students who do not fall into either of these categories. These results are heavily influenced by the intersectionality of students of color and working class students, as the two groups largely overlap both in the United States population and in the engineering student body at this institution.The results support liberative theoretical claims that societal structures, such as patriarchalism, racism, and capitalism, have filtering effects that impact the opportunities available to individuals with marginalized identities throughout their lives. As incremental interventions fail to address the roots of these problems, they cannot entirely remove the debilitating obstacles facing students from marginalized identity groups; the only true solution lies in liberation from oppressive social structures. In accordance with critical and liberative theories, engineering educators can and should contribute to liberative efforts by employing pedagogical methods that challenge structural oppression.