Understanding the Mentoring Needs of African-American Female Engineering Students: A Phenomenographic Preliminary Analysis

Abstract

Marie C. Paretti is an Associate Professor of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, where she codirects the Virginia Tech Engineering Communications Center (VTECC). Her research focuses on communication in engineering design, interdisciplinary communication and collaboration, design education, and gender in engineering. She was awarded a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation to study expert teaching in capstone design courses, and is co-PI on numerous NSF grants exploring communication, design, and identity in engineering. Drawing on theories of situated learning and identity development, her work includes studies on the teaching and learning of communication, effective teaching practices in design education, the effects of differing design pedagogies on retention and motivation, the dynamics of cross-disciplinary collaboration in both academic and industry design environments, and gender and identity in engineering.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2015Page 26.1625.1 Understanding the Mentoring Needs of African-American Female Engineering Students: A Phenomenographic Preliminary Analysis AbstractSeeking to improve retention of underrepresented minorities within the STEM fields, we often discuss why these students leave, but spend less time on the measures that support persistence. Research has shown that mentoring is one essential source of such support for students of color. But our current understanding of the role of mentoring or its critical components is incomplete, both in a general sense and for specific populations. For example, the mentoring experiences of undergraduate African American women, especially in the field of engineering, is particularly understudied. To address this gap, the aim of this study is to gain an understanding of how undergraduate African American women in engineering experience effective faculty mentoring.As a group that lives at the intersection of both African American and female identities experienced simultaneously, African American women's socially defined categorizations provides a unique perspective that can distinctively impact their experiences, including their mentoring relationships. To understand their experiences, we apply phenomenography because of its capability to minimize essentialization and highlight variations within a phenomenon of interest or experience. Fundamentally, this method does not aim to generalize the experiences of all African American women in engineering, but rather to explore the different ways participants in this group experience mentoring relationships. We used student interviews to gather explicit examples of participants' experiences. Here we present a preliminary analysis of the data.The results yielded preliminary groupings based on variations in context, formation, and tone. These findings suggest that mentors can serve a variety of roles and engage with students in multiple ways. Perhaps more importantly, these roles and engagement patterns can occur across race and sex boundaries.

Action on Diversity: A Content Analysis of ASEE Conference Papers, 2015–2016

“…Publications regarding mentoring discussed understanding the perspectives of those involved in the mentoring experience (Mondisa, Brown, & Adams, 2015) and how this process strengthens their identity (Smith & Paretti, 2015), the context in which this mentoring is taking place and the role of such mentoring in career socialization (Rajan et al, 2015).…”