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Capturing the Experiences of ESL Graduate Students in Engineering Education

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Conference

2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Tampa, Florida

Publication Date

June 15, 2019

Start Date

June 15, 2019

End Date

June 19, 2019

Conference Session

Graduate Student Support

Tagged Division

Graduate Studies

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

13

DOI

10.18260/1-2--32497

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/32497

Download Count

480

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Paper Authors

biography

Hoda Ehsan Purdue University-Main Campus, West Lafayette (College of Engineering) Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-3681-317X

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Hoda is a Ph.D. student in the School of Engineering Education, Purdue. She received her B.S. in mechanical engineering in Iran, and obtained her M.S. in Childhood Education and New York teaching certification from City College of New York (CUNY-CCNY). She is now a graduate research assistant on STEM+C project. Her research interests include designing informal setting for engineering learning, and promoting engineering thinking in differently abled students in informal and formal settings.

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biography

Matilde Luz Sanchez-Pena Purdue University-Main Campus, West Lafayette (College of Engineering)

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Matilde Sanchez-Pena is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue University. She completed her Ph.D. at the same institution in 2018. Her dissertation explored differences across gender of faculty retention and promotion at research-intensive institutions. Dr. Sanchez-Pena aims to promote a more equitable engineering field, in which students of all backgrounds can acquire the knowledge and skills to achieve their goals. Before engaging in Engineering Education research, she completed graduate degrees in Industrial Engineering and Statistics and contributed to a wide range of research areas including genetic disorders, manufacturing optimization, cancer biomarker detection, and the evaluation of social programs.

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Hossein EbrahimNejad Purdue University-Main Campus, West Lafayette (College of Engineering)

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Hossein Ebrahiminejad is a Ph.D. student in Engineering Education at Purdue University. He completed his M.S. in Biomedical Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), and his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in Iran. His research interests include student pathways, educational policy, and quantitative research methods.

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biography

Hassan Ali Al Yagoub Purdue University-Main Campus, West Lafayette (College of Engineering) Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-8812-4109

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Hassan Al Yagoub is a Ph.D. student in Engineering Education at Purdue University. His research interests include diversity & inclusion, students’ persistence, advising and mentoring, engineering career pathways, and school-to-work transition of new engineers.
He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.
Prior to beginning his doctoral studies, Hassan worked for five years at General Electric where he graduated from their Edison Engineering Development Program (EEDP) and then worked as a gas turbine fleet management engineer. In addition to his technical role, Hassan supported the recruiting, interview, and selection process of the EEDP Program, where he mentored interns, co-ops and Edison associates from the Middle East and Africa regions by developing and teaching a technical training curriculum, providing guidance for graduate school applications, and providing career consultation.

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Abstract

Doctoral education can be a challenging and overwhelming journey for many graduate students. Engineering Education as an emerging interdisciplinary field welcomes diverse students in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, ability, and language. Therefore, the experiences and needs of engineering education graduate students’ are varied. Their diverse needs require equally diverse support structures. We are a group of engineering education students and alumni who share the experience of speaking English as a second language (ESL). Using a duoethnographical approach, we aim to reflect on our doctoral journey in engineering education and highlight the challenges we went through and the strategies used to overcome them. We are taking the positionality of “researcher to participant”, to examine our experiences. Our challenges and strategies are centered about experiences with cultural differences, identity formation, language barriers, and the expectations from ourselves and our broader engineering education community. This study intends to convey a message to other ESL graduate students a message of solidarity in their own doctoral journey. The findings of our study can also highlight the approaches that other ESL students can take to help them overcome the challenges that they may face. In the end, the findings of this study can inform policymakers and school administrators about the ways they can support their ESL students.

Ehsan, H., & Sanchez-Pena, M. L., & EbrahimNejad, H., & Al Yagoub, H. A. (2019, June), Capturing the Experiences of ESL Graduate Students in Engineering Education Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--32497

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: © 2019 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