From the Mouths of Students: Two Illustrations of Narrative Analysis to Understand Engineering Education’s Ruling Relations as Gendered and Raced

Abstract

Much research done in engineering education on white women and people of color's underrepresentation relies on methods which necessitate collapsing the experiences of all women together and the experiences of all people of color together in order to gain sufficiently large sample populations for statistical tests. This methodologically necessary act functions to erase the experiences of women of color for the purposes of the method, not for the purpose of better understanding the phenomenon, and runs counter to existing social science research on gender and race. With this project, we are working to develop methods that allow us to "learn from small numbers" of students, as this is what we have in the context of undergraduate engineering education. This paper builds on work introduced at ASEE 2013, where we discussed our methodological challenges with data collection and analysis. This current paper describes the analysis decisions we made in the intervening year, and offers two cases to illustrate the affordances of the proffered method to help engineering education researchers think about how the structure of engineering educational institutions -the "ruling relations" by which we structure our undergraduate engineering programs -function to gender and race our undergraduate engineering populations.