Allison Godwin, Ph.D: Understanding how identity influences diverse students to choose engineering and persist in engineering

In this blog post, we will hear from Allison Godwin, Ph.D, Associate Professor of Engineering Education and of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University.

Allison Godwin, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Engineering Education and of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University. She is also the Workforce Development Director for CISTAR, the Center for Innovative and Strategic Transformation of Alkane Resources, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center. Her research focuses how identity, among other affective factors, influences diverse students to choose engineering and persist in engineering. She also studies how different experiences within the practice and culture of engineering foster or hinder belongingness and identity development. Dr. Godwin graduated from Clemson University with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Ph.D. in Engineering and Science Education. Her research earned her a National Science Foundation CAREER Award focused on characterizing latent diversity, which includes diverse attitudes, mindsets, and approaches to learning to understand engineering students’ identity development. She has won several awards for her research including the 2017 the IEEE Frontiers in Education Benjamin J. Dasher Award and the 2020 American Society of Engineering Education Educational Research and Methods Division Best Diversity Paper Award. In the classroom, Dr. Godwin has also been honored with awards for teaching including being invited as a participant in to the 2016 National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium and being awarded the 2018 Purdue University College of Engineering Exceptional Early Career Teaching Award.

At the end of this post, don’t miss out on the opportunity to connect with our scholar and learn more about the ASEE CDEI‘s efforts.

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Scholar Interview

Q1: Can you tell us your story of belongingness?

I decided I wanted to be an engineer early on—in fifth grade—before I even understood what engineering was. I saw a science demonstration by a chemical engineer, and it was so interesting and so exciting that I thought, “this is for me.” As I went through my high school and undergraduate education, I fell deeply in love with the science and mathematics that was applied in my chemical engineering work. I felt included as an engineer until I started working in industry through a cooperative education experience and in my first job. That workplace was the first time I started to feel like an outsider and that I did not belong, which is a part of my privilege as a White woman; I know that feeling included in a university setting is not the experiences of all students. I was the only female engineer working on site. My co-workers regularly made sexist comments or did things that singled me out and made me feel excluded. For example, I would walk into a room and the conversation completely stopped. In addition to those kinds of subtle experiences of bias, I also had overt experiences of bias and sexual harassment. That environment made me start to question if I really wanted to be an engineer what else I might do with my degree.

I made the transition into engineering education because of my love of engineering fundamentals and teaching. I tutored in chemistry and calculus in high school and in college, and some sort of teaching role seemed like the next step for me. I found engineering education, a bit by accident. My former undergraduate academic advisor heard I was thinking about graduate school focused on an education pathway and forwarded an email recruiting a graduate research assistant for a National Science Foundation-funded grant on sustainability as a topic to support women’s pathways into engineering. The project was collaborative between civil engineering and the newly formed Engineering and Science Education program at Clemson University. Once I started learning more about the field of engineering education, I realized that it was the perfect next step to combine my interest in education, engineering, and research.

I feel like I belong in engineering education. I am involved with the ASEE Educational Research and Methods Division and the Chemical Engineering Division. Those communities have provided such great networking experiences and professional development opportunities. I have a network of people that I would call friends rather than colleagues. My graduate program and my current work environment at Purdue University have provided such significant support for me as a whole person. The regular interactions and support that I get from the engineering education community have been the signals of belongingness that have shaped who I am as a researcher. As I have grown as a researcher, I have had an opportunity to reflect on my experiences and pathways into the work that I do. I realize that the winding path to engineering education has shaped my understanding of DEI and the kinds of questions I ask.

Q2: What is your understanding of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and why is it important to what you do?

I think about diversity, equity inclusion (DEI) work as integral to what it means to be an engineer and what it means to my research. I study how students develop identities as engineers and how that identity is integrated into a larger sense of self with other multiple identities. Identity is a complex concept that consists of multiple, overlapping, and layered pieces. While I focus on engineering identity, I cannot separate that part of identity from other identities. For example, my identity as White, a ciswoman, a mother, and other parts of who I am. Additionally, the context in which someone is situated dictates how important each of those might be. Identity is a constantly ongoing negotiation between how an individual positions themselves in the world through their agency as well as how structures—norms, values, policies, practices, etc.—position the individual. This work brings opportunities to question how engineering culture shapes the experience of the individual and how this experience can signal inclusion or exclusion.

When I think about DEI in the context of my research, diversity means bringing together differences. We often discuss diversity in terms of demographics and representation and engineering, which is an essential conversation. Engineering historically has been constructed as White, masculine, and heteronormative. That history has created a space that by its nature excludes people based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, to name a few identities. The lack of participation starts early on in learners’ pathways, not just in undergraduate engineering education. The opportunities to which students have access and the recognition that they may or may not receive towards a pathway in engineering shape who is engaged in engineering. Inclusion means that the environment values diversity and allows everyone to be engaged in the work of engineering and supports individuals to thrive. We have got a lot of work still left to do in that space as engineering educators to dismantle the long history of engineering education that excludes, and that is one of the reasons I am motivated to do my research. Equity is at the heart of true change. To me, equity means that everyone gets what they need to be successful. I distinguish that idea as different from equality or everyone gets the same, which I think is often the default in the meritocratic norms of engineering education. I often hear discussions of “fairness” as a guiding principle in engineering linked to equality rather than equity. However, in the framing of equity, fairness means allowing everyone to demonstrate what they know and provides ways for individuals to leverage the assets that they bring with them into the classroom. Equity starts to flip some of the traditional conversations about engineering education on their head and creates a space in which we can re-envision engineering education as a place where students’ multiple identities are included and engineering work creates a more just world.

Q3: What are your current initiatives towards DEI work?

The name of my research group is STRIDE, which stands for Shaping Transformative Research on Identity and Diversity in Engineering. That name is at the core of what I do. My research focuses on two strands. The first examines how who participates in engineering education is shaped by an engineering culture that has constructed to exclude women, women of color and people of color, first-generation college students who may not know the system and the hidden curriculum of engineering education, LGBTQ+ students, and a wide range of other excluded identities. I focus on understanding how those multiple identities interact with the culture of engineering and create experiences of belonging, or not. My goal in this work is to make change in what we do inside and outside of the classroom and how we do it to support all students in engineering.

The other strand of my work is related to the first—with a focus on how an individual interacts with the culture of engineering—but it draws on theories and frameworks that emphasize that the experiences of each individual are unique and that generalizing findings to an entire group of people reduces the understanding of the lived experience. In that research, I am studying ways of being, thinking, and knowing that are valued in engineering education, and how do those embedded norms communicate certain kinds of messages about who belongs. This work asks questions about what happens in the process of engineering education when students enter engineering with ways of being, thinking, and knowing that are not aligned with the cultural norms of engineering (in our work we call this latent diversity, or underlying differences in students attitudes, beliefs, and mindsets). We ask questions like, “Do these students norm? Moreover, what does that mean for those who engage in engineering and the quality of engineering solutions, and the justice of engineering education? Alternatively, do these students leave? What experiences and practices support latently diverse students, what do not?” I believe that both strands of my research are core to understanding how engineering education can be reshaped to include a diverse group of people in challenging how racism, classism, sexism, and other forms of oppression in engineering and how engineering values and knowledge shape participation and identity development.

I explore these questions using mixed methods research, which brings particular kinds of challenges in considering how my work may challenge or replicate norms in engineering. One of the things I am excited about some of my newer work in considering ways to challenge quantitative research norms by using more inclusive data analysis techniques and the process of making claims from quantitative work.

Q4: What do you see as the next steps for your DEI work?

Most people know me for my work on understanding engineering identity. I have developed quantitative measures of engineering identity and studied how those are linked to student outcomes like retention and success. I have also studied how student narratives reveal the process of identity development over time. I think that work, along with the work of other scholars in this area, has given me a very rich appreciation and understanding of the foundational theoretical components of engineering identity.

My next steps in research are focused on thinking about how that theoretical understanding translates into practice. I am thinking about how I create classroom environments that signal belonging that promote identity development for a diverse group of students, particularly in large enrollment classrooms. I am considering how to reshape curriculum, particularly in chemical engineering, to deconstruct the norms of what is valued in engineering education to bring in diverse perspectives. My next question is centered on how I get faculty to take up those new ways of doing.

I am also concerned with how I get faculty to take up these evidence-based practices, and not just the folks who are already seeking out opportunities to learn and grow in their inclusive teaching. So, I am thinking about what are the effective practices in creating inclusive, identity supporting environments, and how I get those practices to be an everyday part of engineering education.

Q5: What recommendations do you have for engineering educators to start incorporating social justice in their classrooms?

My recommendations for engineering educators who are starting to think about incorporating social justice topics in their classroom are twofold. One, educators need to do the hard work of engaging in personal transformation and learning. This effort involves sitting in a space where you critically question what you bring to a teaching role and to a research role. This process is not an overnight effort—it takes time and intentional reflection. It takes doing the work to become anti-racist, anti-sexist, and to challenge the built-in biases you have developed over years. Several editorials and publications by Brooke Coley, Denise Simmons, and Susan Lord; Kelly Cross; James Holly, Jr.; and Leroy L. Long III have been recently published that begin to outline the work in which White scholars, in particular, need to be engaged.

I think the second component of where to start is that change does not have to happen all at once. Start with an effort to make a difference in what is done and build the changes over time. Maybe it looks like overhauling the syllabus to include an inclusion statement and a description of the support you will provide to students beyond the boilerplate anti-discrimination statements provided by the university. Or maybe it is a commitment to reading and talking with a group of people about a really difficult topic. For me, that commitment has been a regular accountability meeting with other White scholars who are asking questions about how we reproduce racist practices in our research and teaching. Maybe it is working on inclusive language and understanding your students or rethinking assessment to be an opportunity for students to show what they have learned beyond high stakes summative testing. There are many different strategies that you might start with. My encouragement is that you need to start and that you do not have to do it all at once. I think the other thing to think about is being prepared for when you face resistance from students, from peers, from colleagues, and from administrators about pushing against the norms and the culture of engineering, in your work. You need to be ready for that and prepared to continue to do the work that needs to be done.

Q6: What resource can you recommend to people who want to learn more about DEI in your field?

There are so many great resources available and they have only become more widely available as critical conversations around race and racism in our country have been happening over the past year with Black Lives Matter and the murder of George Floyd as starting points that have brought awareness to critical issues. Some books that have been particularly important for me have been Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology edited by Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Donna Riley has written extensively about rethinking pedagogies in engineering classes. There are also works on the history of engineering education by Amy Slayton and Juan Lucena that start to unpack how our field became one with the deeply held norms and values that create an engineering culture that excludes. These are just a few examples to do the hard work of self-reflection and critical questioning.

Once you have an understanding of the history of engineering education and start to wrap your head around how it has been structured to exclude, you can start to ask questions about how you actively work to change those norms. Working for change is essential. Active work is required to change the status quo. There are so many practical resources from the American Society for Engineering Education Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. They are offering virtual workshops that are recorded. There are many excellent books and workshops offered in critical, culturally relevant, and inclusive pedagogies. A quick search will bring up dozens of options. I have been thinking about those topics concerning creating identity safe classrooms, which is a set of research from social psychology. I could continue to write lists and lists of suggestions, but I think the most important part is to start and start now.

Recommended ASEE PEER paper from our scholar:

Godwin, A., & Benedict, B. S., & Rohde, J., & Verdín, D., & Thielmeyer, A. R. H., & Clements, H. R., & Chen, Z. S. (2020, June), CAREER: Actualizing Latent Diversity in Undergraduate Engineering Education Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . https://peer.asee.org/34262

Abstract Excerpt: “Engineering culture values particular ways of being, thinking, and knowing that can be exclusive for some students. Students’ feelings of belonging are a number one reason why students leave engineering. As a result, this misalignment influences how students develop and author their identity as an engineer. This project focuses on characterizing the underlying attitudes, beliefs, and mindsets (i.e., latent diversity) that students bring with them into engineering as well as how the culture of engineering may support these students or not.”

Find more articles on ASEE Peer for this scholar: Allison Godwin

Recent paper: Farrell, S., Godwin, A., & Riley, D. M. (2021). A Sociocultural Learning Framework for Inclusive Pedagogy in Engineering. Chemical Engineering Education, 55(4), 192-204.

Connect with our scholar:

• Website: http://engineering.purdue.edu/STRIDE
• Twitter: @agodwinSTRIDE, @PurdueENE

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