Geeks Are Chic: Cultural Identity And Engineering Students’ Pathways To The Profession

Abstract

Within the CAEE, Dr. Loshbaugh has been responsible for developing and maintaining the CSM cohort of students, and collaborating on development of protocols and/or instruments in ethnography, the survey, and structured interviews. She has conducted ethnographic interviews, directly observed students, and collaborated in the development of a codebook for analysis of the ethnographic interview data. Dr. Loshbaugh taught in CSM's EPICS program, for which she developed extensive course and faculty-support materials, and designed and implemented a leadership course and overseas summer field session. She has recently been appointed to develop a diversity plan for CSM, and has experience in international education, corporate training and coaching, and academic editing.

Mining Social Media Data for Understanding Students’ Learning Experiences

“…"), while most others desire more social life as the examples above show. Loshbaugh and Claar [48] find that many students feel the nerdy and geeky culture of engineering is unwelcoming, which is detrimental for student recruitment and retention. Eventually, the society needs engineers who can work with people and solve problems that can benefit humanity [9], [49].…”

Assessing Students’ Approaches and Perceptions to Learning in Physics Experiments Based on Simulations and At-Home Lab Kits

“…While OSCBS and HALK labs have been integrated into online physics courses for some time now, resistance to their widespread use and concerns about their impact on student learning remain prevalent (Brinson, 2015). Understanding students" perceptions of learning and approaches to learning are essential for student recruitment (Loshbaugh & Claar, 2007), retention (Sithole et al, 2017), identity and learning (Tudor et al, 2010).…”

A Mixed-methods Study of Non-text Social Media Content as a Window into African-American Youth STEM Identities

“…The frequency of occurrence was significant because the frequently-occurring emoji and hashtags formed a core vocabulary for the social media content shared by a variety of NSBE chapters/communities of practice across the country. Also, in this analysis we saw that the Nerd Face emoji had a very low frequency, which we interpreted as lower than might be expected if one were to accept the stereotype of STEM enthusiasts as "nerds" [27], [28]. As we studied the patterns of paralinguistic elements and text in our social media content datasets, and we made meanings from our contextual interpretations of the artifacts, we recognized indicators of STEM-related identities and communities of practice.…”

“…The shared repertoire dimension was illustrated by a variety of artifacts that referred to tools and resources (such as #NotesonFleek in Figure 2), but most notably by the array of artifacts that referred to style, professional presentation, attire, good looks, and/or chapter members standing together literally or figuratively. There exist stereotypes of engineers and scientists as "nerds" that are not adopted by all within STEM communities of practice; these stereotypes have been studied by researchers such as Tonso [27], and Loshbaugh and Claar [28]. We noted that 24 of the 116 Twitter data instances and 14 of the 36 Instagram instances showed NSBE members dressed and publicly presenting in stylish attire, with social poise, and/or specifically mentioning non-technical interests such as music or sports.…”