CAREER: Investigation of Undergraduate Learning Contexts Considering Ethical, Racial, and Disciplinary Identities of Students in Engineering and Computer Science

In consultation with program officer, PI has made decision to begin work on this study once new appointment at Northwestern university begins (September 1, 2018). Therefore, as outlined in the project summary, the work to be accomplished includes both the ethnographic as well as design-based research components of the study. Both of these will be carried out once PI arrives at Northwestern university. Overview It is difficult to overstate the degree to which advances in engineering and computer science (CS) are transforming the social, environmental, economic, and political realities of the 21st century. Yet, prior research has shown that sociopolitical and ethical concerns are largely suppressed within engineering and CS science programs (Astin, 1993a; Astin, 1993b; Garibay, 2015), and importantly, that among STEM undergraduates, “USC [underrepresented students of color] have significantly higher aspirations to work for social change than their non-USC counterparts” (Garibay, 2015, p.17). Other research has shown that students of color often experience the climate of STEM undergraduate programs as alienating and disjointed from their racial and cultural identities (Brown, 2002; Carlone & Johnson, 2007; Ong, Wright, Espinosa, & Orfield, 2011). However, much less is known about the complex interplay between students’ ethical, racial, and disciplinary identities, how these identities develop (or regress) over the course of their undergraduate years and across the multiple formal and informal contexts students experience, or how to explicitly design learning environments that jointly cultivate students’ multiple identities. At its core, this NSF CAREER proposal combines longitudinal ethnographic and design-based methodologies to investigate how undergraduate learning contexts may constrain and/or facilitate productive interactions between students’ ethical, racial, and disciplinary identities in engineering and CS. Intellectual Merit Findings from thi