Inequality in an Elite Engineering School: Social Class Contextual, Gender, and Racial Differences in Peer Collaboration (Poster 21)

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Peer collaboration in STEM programs, when properly structured, has the potential to create more equitable learning opportunities for all students. However, research on STEM learning environments has well documented the existence of unequal learning opportunities among students in collaborative settings. I draw on a qualitative case study of an engineering school at an elite private university, which consists of ethnographic observations over the course of two and a half years as well as interviews with six administrators and 88 engineering undergraduates. Using an intersectional analysis, I examine how social class context, gender, and race shape how students collaborate with peers in an elite engineering program. I focus on how students collaborate, how they experience collaboration, and how they respond to their collaborative experiences. I find class contextual differences in the strategies students use to collaborate, gender and racial differences in students’ experiences with collaboration, and class contextual differences in the strategies students use to manage these gendered and racialized collaborative experiences. The findings advance our understanding of the role social class context—as it interacts with gender and race—plays in producing inequalities in collaboration and has implications for elite STEM programs that are recruiting and enrolling talented students from underrepresented class contextual, gender, and racial backgrounds and that are fostering collaborative learning environments.

Author

• Anthony M. Johnson, The Ohio State University