From the Mouths of Students: Two Illustrations of Narrative Analysis to Understand Engineering Education’s Ruling Relations as Gendered and Raced

Much research done in engineering education on white women and people of color’s underrepresentation relies on methods which necessitate collapsing the experiences of all women together and the experiences of all people of color together in order to gain sufficiently large sample populations for statistical tests. This methodologically necessary act functions to erase the experiences of women of color for the purposes of the method, not for the purpose of better understanding the phenomenon, and runs counter to existing social science research on gender and race. With this project, we are working to develop methods that allow us to “learn from small numbers” of students, as this is what we have in the context of undergraduate engineering education. This paper builds on work introduced at ASEE 2013, where we discussed our methodological challenges with data collection and analysis. This current paper describes the analysis decisions we made in the intervening year, and offers two cases to illustrate the affordances of the proffered method to help engineering education researchers think about how the structure of engineering educational institutions – the “ruling relations” by which we structure our undergraduate engineering programs – function to gender and race our undergraduate engineering populations. Introduction While white women and most racial minority men and women are still underrepresented in engineering education across the United States and across engineering disciplines compared to their representation in the general population or in college students specifically, the patterns of underrepresentation are different when looking at race and gender together rather than independently. For example, in 2010, white women constituted 16.2% of all white engineering students, while African American women are 25% of all African American engineering students. In fact, of all the races considered underrepresented in engineering education, white women constitute the smallest fraction of their racial group. The theoretical perspective that prompts researchers to methodologically consider race and gender together is called “intersectionality,” and has its roots in law, sociology and women’s studies. In addition, much engineering education research on gender and race has tended to take a dated perspective on gender and race: briefly, that gender and race are enduring, unquestionable demographic characteristics of individuals. In contrast, much valuable work elsewhere in the social sciences, particularly in sociology, interprets gender and race as a set of relations and social processes in context, which allows researchers to consider how institutions and organizations themselves are “gendered” and “raced.” This work is under-engaged by engineering education researchers, but would prompt us to consider that the fact that white men constitute the majority of engineering students, faculty and administrators (let along practitioners) is evidence of the gendered and raced character of engineering educational structures, where the “ruling relations” (which are understood as the operating procedures that implicitly or explicitly govern “how we do things” in engineering education) maintain the institution’s gendered and raced character in the face of explicit diversity and inclusion efforts. It allows us to see why diversity efforts have made such little progress in engineering education so far, compared to the effort and resources invested. P ge 24633.2 This research works to answer these questions: RQ1. How do underrepresented undergraduate engineering students describe their interactions with educational institutions through personal narratives? RQ2. What institutional factors do these narratives reveal that affect the educational persistence and success of white women and students of color in undergraduate engineering educational institutions? This paper builds upon work we presented at ASEE 2013 where we described the theoretical and methodological grounding of this project, and expands now into the presentation of data and analysis. Since that time, we have incorporated theories of intersectionality and gendered and raced ruling relations into the interpretation of our interview data, collected from a diverse set of undergraduate engineering students or recent graduates. We present stories from two students as cases to demonstrate the analytic process which treats the interview intersectionally, and helps us see how ruling relations function to maintain engineering education a gendered and raced institution. We analyze these stories over multiple readings where each reading has a particular lens, in contrast with a process of iterative coding (whether motivated by thematic analysis or grounded theory). These readings make use of narrative theory, a method developed in the social sciences that prompts us to view students’ responses as having a structure from which we can also learn – in other words, narrative theory suggest that how students tell us their stories of their engineering education is as important to our research as what they say. We believe that conference papers should make use of the advantages afforded conference papers over journal papers: the expectation of presenting intermediate conclusions or as-yet unfinished work; the absence of page restrictions so we have the space make available our detailed method for community scrutiny; and the opportunity to discuss findings with colleagues. We have structured this paper in light of these affordances: we discuss in detail this study’s developments regarding data handling, analysis and interpretation. We illustrate what we can learn regarding ruling relations from these small numbers of interviews using two cases. Background Key literature from past work In our 2013 paper, we discussed at length the foundational literature that guides this work. We will not repeat that there, but present highlights in which to situate this paper, and encourage readers to read the longer work for a deeper treatment. Briefly, we take race and gender as primary lenses of social analysis. Race is a social categorization of people based on physical and cultural characteristics; its history is rooted in biological essentialism, which we now understand as a categorization scheme wrongly justified not by biology but by colonialism, including slavery and the genocide of indigenous people. Gender is also a social categorization of people based on a complex of physical characteristics, and also adding in reproductive roles, and additional social relations; noted gender theorist Connell defines gender as “the structure of social relations that centers on the reproductive arena, and the set of practices that bring reproductive distinctions between bodies into social processes” (p. 11). So, for example, because we see more men than women in our engineering courses, this definition of “gender” means we can infer that we have ordered social relations to make it so. Our study is on the social relations that so order our classrooms. P ge 24633.3 Our research aims to take an intersectional approach to the study of gender and race. This means that we note how existing logics of the study of race and gender function to erase the experiences of women of color. Crenshaw explored this with respect to the experiences of Black women in her germinal piece on discrimination law: she demonstrated through case studies that Black men had come to represent the experiences of all Black people in discrimination cases, and that Black women could not do similarly, and that White women had come to represent all women, but Black women again could not do similarly. She wrote, “sex and race discrimination have come to be defined in terms of the experiences of those who are privileged but for their racial or sexual characteristics.” In other words, Black men had come to represent all Black people because they were only “disadvantaged” in terms of race; White women had come to represent all women because they were only “disadvantaged” in terms of sex. But this functions to erase the experiences of Black women, who can be discriminated against based on race, sex, or both together in a different way than both race and sex independently. In a parallel way in engineering education research, White women have come to represent the experiences of all women of color because there are usually so few women of color the statistical significance of their experiences are insufficiently powerful to be broken out separately. While there may be methodological justification to collapse women of all races together, this act is wholly counter the recommendations of race and gender theory. Intersectionality theory demands that we consider how race and gender act together, and particularly to highlight the experiences of women of color rather than erase them. In this study, therefore, we use methods that have the ability to help us “learn from small numbers” of people. In addition, while our project initially endeavored to focus on gender and race, as this is how governing bodies frame the underrepresentation problem in engineering education, we quickly realized that we could not overlook class theory in our analysis. Briefly, class theory undergirds race and gender theory first by virtue of framing the value of considering certain groups “classes” to study, and second by providing conflict theory as a foundation for much anti-racist and feminist social theory. 11 However, in the United States, we live in a culture that historically bound race and class together through law and policy, including through segregation statues, housing policy, and federal loans for mortgages, and echoes of this history remain firm in contemporary US society. So, simply speaking, to look at race from an institutional perspective necessitates a study of class because of the processes by which we collectively have raced so many economic practices over the his