On Faculty Responsibility for Increasing Students' Sense of Support in the Classroom: Lessons from I-MATTER about Black and Brown Students
Conference
Masta, S, Grant, J, Margherio, C et al. (2023). On Faculty Responsibility for Increasing Students' Sense of Support in the Classroom: Lessons from I-MATTER about Black and Brown Students
.
Masta, S, Grant, J, Margherio, C et al. (2023). On Faculty Responsibility for Increasing Students' Sense of Support in the Classroom: Lessons from I-MATTER about Black and Brown Students
.
Teaching engineering students how to work in teams is necessary, important, and hard to do well. Minoritized students experience forms of marginalization from their teammates routinely, which affects their access to safe learning environments. Team evaluation tools like CATME can help instructors see where teaming problems are, but are often normed in ways that obscure the subtle if pervasive harassment of minoritized teammates. Instructors, particularly of large courses, need better ways to identify teams that are marginalizing minoritized team members. This paper introduces theory on microaggressions, selective incivility theory, and coded language to interpret data collected from a complex study site during the COVID-19 pandemic. The team collected data from classroom observations (moved virtual during COVID), interviews with instructors, interviews with students, interpretations of historical data collected through an online team evaluation tool called CATME, and a diary study where students documented their reflections on their marginalization by teammates. While data collection and analysis did not, of course, go as the research team had planned, it yielded insights into how frequently minoritized teammates experience marginalization, instructors' sense of their responsibility and skill for addressing such, marginalization, and students' sense of defeat in hoping for more equitable and supportive learning environments. The paper describes our data collection processes, analysis, and some choice insights drawn from this multi-year study at a large, research-extensive white university.
