“The lab isn't life”: Black engineering graduate students reprioritize values at the intersection of two pandemics

Abstract

Background: Black engineering graduate students represent a critical and understudied population in engineering education. Gaining an understanding of the lived experiences of Black engineering graduate students while they are simultaneously weathering two pandemics, COVID-19 and systemic racism, is of paramount importance. Purpose/Hypothesis: Black engineering graduate students hold a unique duality, as both Black people in the United States and Black graduate students in US engineering programs that espouse white supremacist ideals. Their realworld experiences necessitate understanding, and this paper highlights the related impact on the students themselves, their adaptations to the pandemics, and how those adaptations relate to and affect their support needs and navigation of their engineering academic environments.Design/Method: An interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) approach was combined with community-based participatory action research and was situated in Boykin's Triple Quandary. A family check-in was conducted with 10 Black engineering graduate students enrolled in doctoral programs across the country to delve deep into their lived experience as a cultural community. Results: Findings include an emergent framework of Black engineering graduate student values in response to the pandemics. These values aligned with the Black Cultural Ethos, demonstrating an adoption of collectivistic cultural values in times of crises. Further, COVID-19 and systemic racism differentially impacted Black engineering graduate students and, thus, the manifestations of their values. Conclusion: For institutions to be able to effectively support their Black engineering graduate students, they must gain awareness of the students' experiences, values, and needs, in general, and amid crises specifically. The findings presented here provide a critical window into this information.

“I Didn’t Succumb to the Darkness”: Multi-Modal Reflections on Black Womxn’s Engineering PhD Spirit-Murdering Experiences

“…They discuss their strength to endure and how it kept them going through the dark times; however, they questioned if they wanted to endure that type of murder experience again just because they could "survive" it. Therefore, four of the six Homegirls presented in this poem have changed their professorial intentions (Burt, 2019;Coley & Thomas, 2023) as impacted by their experiences. They expressed pride in not "succumb [ing] to the darkness," but boy, what a loss to the engineering academic community.…”

Recommendations toward an antiracist engineering: Informing an institutional agenda to enhance Black engineering student experiences

“…Racialized experiences of Black students in higher education, and specifically in STEM, have been studied (Blake et al, 2021; Burt et al, 2023; Coley and Thomas, 2023; McGee et al, 2019; Ong et al, 2018; Wilkins-Yel et al, 2022). However, the percentage of doctoral degrees awarded to Black engineers remains low compared to other racial groups (ASEE, 2022) and Black students continue to experience racism.…”

“…Further, in that same year, 53.7% had no Blacks receiving doctoral degrees (ASEE, 2022; McGee et al, 2022). We recognize that students of color enrolled in Ph.D. programs constantly navigate through racist environments (McGee, 2020; Schulze and Tomal, 2006) associated with experiences of microaggressions, tokenism, hypervisibility, invisibility (Ong et al, 2018; Wilkins-Yel et al, 2022), stressors and strains (McGee et al, 2019), and cultural values not valued in the institutional realm (Coley and Thomas, 2023).…”

Pivoting from Problems to Possibilities in Response to Dual Pandemics

“…In 2020, COVID-19 and continual acts of systemic racism in the U.S., which have been described as dual pandemics (Coley & Thomas, 2023;Jones, 2021), introduced new realities and rapidly brought about changes to our daily lives and norms. Within education, faculty and educational leaders were forced to frantically strategize new approaches to engaging and supporting learning associates (students) in ways unimaginable (Capello, 2023).…”

“…In addition to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pervasiveness of racism and oppression in the U.S. gained much attention after the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, whose death was recorded and seen around the world. These incidents compounded with the disproportionate percentage of deaths related to COVID-19 within the Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities (Coley & Thomas, 2023;Jones, 2021) resulted in outcries and demonstrations in cities across the U.S. and abroad. Subsequently, both new and continued demands for antiracism quickly materialized (Beatty et al, 2020).…”