Initiating and sustaining international ethnic engineering education scholarly communities in the United States

• In Event: An International Student Perspective: Criticality, Self-reflction & Experiences of International Students and Educators

Proposal

Cultivating research capability is a central focus in higher education and particularly critical for engineering education research, an emerging but rapidly developing field of inquiry. Recent literature in engineering education has shared the experiences of capability building related to the community of practice. For example, Matemba et al. (2023) depicted how a professional community, the Engineering Education Research Network in Africa, catalyzes scholarship and mentorship in engineering education research. They highlighted the benefits of such a research community, including capacity development, networking, emotional support, impact on professional identity, social and environmental impact, and breaking borders. Goldsmith et al. (2023) used autoethnography to share their journey into engineering education research by engaging in the research community, the Centre for Research in Engineering & Information Technology Education in Australia. They identified the crucial role of this community in establishing a safe space for the growth of novice engineering educators for both knowledge-building and socialization. Furthermore, Jensen et al. (2023) described an NSF grant-based mentoring program in the United States, Research Initiation in Engineering Formation, which paired engineering faculty in traditional disciplines with experienced engineering education researchers to conduct educational research in engineering. Such mentoring relationships facilitated professional development and authentic engagement for novice faculty and helped reduce the uncomfortable feeling of “imposter syndrome” in the new field of inquiry.
However, extant documented literature primarily focuses on faculty development. Worldwide, numerous graduate programs focusing on engineering education have been established and graduate students could also benefit from such formal or informal communities outside their programs. Particularly, research on international graduate students in an engineering education program suggests that they share a feeling of lack of belongingness, complain that they are rarely heard or understood, which is complicated by their legal status (Brijmohan et al., 2022; Vargas-Ordóñez et al., 2022). Responding to a call to genuinely support international engineering students’ well-being and career development and counteract their othered experiences (Xu et al., 2023), this work aims to contrast the experiences of initiating and sustaining two student-led international ethnic engineering education scholarly communities for Chinese and African groups. In this proposal, we operationalize international ethnic groups as groups that identify as non-domestic American and belong to a common origin, national (e.g., Chinese international students) or continental (African international students). The goal is to reflect on our, two community facilitators’, lived experiences and inspire future students and academics to cultivate such communities to broaden participation and enhance research capability.
We adopt the Community of Practice (CoP) as the theoretical framework for this work. Wenger et al. (2002) defined CoP as “groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis (p. 4).” Specifically, positioning our international ethnic scholarly communities as the structures locates the domain as engineering education; the shared practice as sharing, discussing, and informal mentoring surrounding mutual support on learning the engineering education research enterprises; and the community consisting of (former and current) graduate students enrolled in or about to enroll into engineering education programs. Echoing the root of CoP, knowledge sharing and building serves as the basic and central function of such scholarly communities.
We opt for a comparative ethnographic narrative analysis in this proposal (Arnault & Sinko, 2021). The method lends us an opportunity to narrate and compare our respective lived experiences in starting and sustaining communities of practice peculiar to our individual international ethnic communities. Our method involves periodic meetings to discuss the mainstays of both the African Engineering Education Fellows in Diaspora group and the Chinese Engineering Education Club. These conversations are tracked with notes taken during our meetings as we discuss the differences and similarities of the groups. Specifically, we focused on the following dimensions of two communities led by the two authors, including (1) the origin and purpose of the community; (2) the characteristics of the community; (3) the practices of the community.
The findings suggest that both communities were formed around the same time, with similar purposes of serving as safe spaces and resources to boost the professional development of their members. Likewise, the diversity and the membership structure for both communities are similar in terms of the geographical locations of members, work and study experiences, and volunteerism. Conversely, the differences of both communities emerge from their different leadership and organizational structures. The major difference rests in the leadership structure. The African Diaspora group formed a formal executive council to facilitate scholastic collaboration opportunities. While individual scholastic collaborations exist in both communities, the AEEF Diaspora group embarks on formal collaborations. However, based on Chinese individual’s research interest and expertise, dyadic or triadic collaboration sometimes gets established as the Chinese community embraces a loosely organization structure with shared leadership, where everyone is welcome to raise questions, seek for advice, and call for gatherings from the entire group.
Both communities sustained healthy to some extent. But due to the different sizes of members, sustaining the communities took place in different forms. For the Chinese community, the spontaneous Q&A and information sharing and the informal gathering at the major conferences help the community members to continuously maintain their intersectional identities as Chinese identities and the engineering education research scholar identity. For the African Diaspora community, the growth model relies on informal but regular gatherings, recentering and decolonizing our experiences, expanding the representation of member African countries within the group, and tackling projects in Africa by interfacing with other existing external bodies. However, both communities value the virtue of providing and sustaining a safe space for its members to explore and develop their professional interests and intersectional identities. Thus, we call for more similar communities could emerge for meaningful groups of individuals to survive and thrive in their domain of inquiry and stay encouraged and supported to experience their entire doctoral or professional careers.

Authors

• Siqing Wei, Purdue University

• Moses Olayemi, University of Oklahoma