Minoritized Student Audio Narratives to Influence Faculty’s Empathic Understanding: Learning from Sophie and Enola
Conference
Secules, S, Kali, MB, McCall, CJ et al. (2024). Minoritized Student Audio Narratives to Influence Faculty’s Empathic Understanding: Learning from Sophie and Enola
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Secules, S, Kali, MB, McCall, CJ et al. (2024). Minoritized Student Audio Narratives to Influence Faculty’s Empathic Understanding: Learning from Sophie and Enola
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Background: Undergraduate engineering education is a critical moment for student experiences and broadening participation, yet many minoritized students experience it as unwelcoming, unsupportive, or exclusionary. Engineering faculty have a central role and responsibility to play in the creation of inclusive classrooms, yet there is a gap in empathic communication for faculty to better understand their students. Education researchers can play a critical role in addressing this communication and empathy gap, but disseminating research findings in long form papers is not accessible for most engineering faculty. Purpose: This paper highlights the audio narratives created through the Audio for Inclusion project, an NSF-funded project intended to help faculty become more aware of students’ hidden and marginalized identities and impacts of those identities on their engineering education experiences. Method: We conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews with 22 nationally recruited undergraduate engineering students and turned these into 10 distinct audio narratives. Our narrative analysis focused on constructing a cohesive, concise, and anonymized narrative that would present key content from student interviews in a format that would preserve some of the immediacy and emotionality of student interviews while improving accessibility and coherence for faculty. Findings: In this paper, we present the scripts and link to audio narratives for two student participants: 1) Sophie, a mixed race (Asian and white) white-passing woman, and 2) Enola, an Indigenous woman. In addition to presenting the written and audio narrative, we comment on the specific lessons we see as valuable for engineering faculty that emerge from each of the audio narratives. Conclusion: This project highlights lessons learned for faculty in the areas of student support, accommodations, inclusive practice, and student perceptions of classroom practice. We present this project as methodological innovation for qualitative research, and as future work, we intend to keep investigating impact on faculty via faculty focus groups, surveys, and workshops. We also highlight this research as a metaphor for the empathic understanding that each faculty member can gain by listening to students, individually and collectively, and distilling lessons for their practice.
