Communicating for Belonging in First-Year Engineering

Abstract

Engineering classrooms, norms, and the stereotypes about who becomes an engineer all communicate implicit, and sometimes explicit messages about who belongs. This research focuses on an ecological belonging intervention, customized to the institutional and course context, to create an environment within introductory engineering courses to support student belonging, particularly for Black, Latino/a/x, and Indigenous (BLI) students. This intervention normalizes discussions of adversity, struggle, and resolution within engineering courses through stories from prior students who have successfully completed the course. This brief paper describes the process of developing the customized intervention messages through focus groups and the training of faculty to support inclusive messaging to students within the classroom to combat the issues of stereotype threat and social belonging. Preliminary results show that treatment BLI students did not have a belonging decrease compared to their control peers, and that this belonging was comparable to White and Asian students in both treatment and control groups. Additionally, the intervention minimized the academic performance equity gap on individual assignments in the course.