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A Review of the State of LGBTQIA+ Student Research in STEM and Engineering Education

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Conference

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual On line

Publication Date

June 22, 2020

Start Date

June 22, 2020

End Date

June 26, 2021

Conference Session

Minoritization Processes and Critical Responses

Tagged Division

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

24

DOI

10.18260/1-2--34045

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/34045

Download Count

533

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Paper Authors

biography

Madeleine Jennings Arizona State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-3165-9230

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Madeleine Jennings is a doctoral student and graduate research assistant at Arizona State University - Polytechnic Campus, pursuing a PhD in Engineering Education Systems and Design and a MS in Human Systems Engineering. They received a BS in Manufacturing Engineering from Texas State University - San Marcos. Madeleine's research interests include investigating and improving the experiences of invisible identities in engineering, such as LGBTQIA+ engineering and ex-engineering students. They are also interested in examining and critiquing the engineering and engineering education institution to determine how its current structure can serve to marginalize minority communities.

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biography

Rod D. Roscoe Arizona State University

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Rod Roscoe is an Associate Professor of human systems engineering in the Polytechnic School of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, and a Diane and Gary Tooker Professor of Effective Education in STEM. He is affiliate faculty of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, and a member of the Institute for the Science of Teaching and Learning (ISTL) and the Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming (CHART). His research investigates how the intersection of learning science, computer science, and user science can inform effective and innovative uses of educational technologies. He is also interested in how engineering education can better prepare future engineers to consider the human elements and impacts of their work, particularly with respect to more equitable and inclusive outcomes.

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Nadia N. Kellam Arizona State University

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Nadia Kellam is Associate Professor in the Polytechnic School of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU). She is a qualitative researcher who primarily uses narrative research methods and is interested more broadly in interpretive research methods. In her research, Dr. Kellam is broadly interested in developing critical understandings of the culture of engineering education and, especially, the experiences of underrepresented undergraduate engineering students and engineering educators. In addition to teaching undergraduate engineering courses and a graduate course on entrepreneurship, she also enjoys teaching qualitative research methods in engineering education in the Engineering Education Systems and Design PhD program at ASU. She is deputy editor of the Journal of Engineering Education.

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Suren Jayasuriya Arizona State University

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Suren Jayasuriya is an assistant professor jointly between the School of Arts, Media and Engineering (AME) and the School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering (ECEE) at Arizona State University. Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University from 2016 - 2017. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University in 2017, and a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 2012. His research interests are in computational imaging and photography, computer vision and graphics, sensors, and education.

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Abstract

The purpose of this critical literature review was to generate awareness of the LGBTQIA+ engineering student experience and research on this community, while also highlighting areas that are lacking or receiving insufficient attention. This work is part of a larger project that aims to review engineering education research with respect to LGBTQIA+ students, higher education faculty and staff, and industry professionals. This literature review was conducted in two phases. First, works from non-engineering disciplines were reviewed to identify popular threads and major areas of research on the LGBTQIA+ student experience. This phase was not an exhaustive review; rather, it was meant to establish specific themes of importance derived from the larger body of literature on the LGBTQIA+ student experience. Second, a literature review identified how engineering-specific research on the LGBTQIA+ student experience aligned with these themes. We identified several themes in the first phase of the literature review: (1) Climate, (2) LGB Monolith, (3) Intersectionality, and (4) Identity Development. Engineering and engineering education literature demonstrated similar themes, although this body of work was unique in the exploration of LGBTQIA+ coping strategies and the use of the technical/social dualism framework. Overall, the engineering education literature on LGBTQIA+ student experiences seemed relatively underdeveloped.

Jennings, M., & Roscoe, R. D., & Kellam, N. N., & Jayasuriya, S. (2020, June), A Review of the State of LGBTQIA+ Student Research in STEM and Engineering Education Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34045

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2020 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015