Cultural (In)Congruence: How Black Women Navigate Individual, Academic, and Societal Dimensions of Engineering

Brooke Coley, Meseret F. Hailu, Prince K. Kwarase, Keti Tsotniashvili

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Despite efforts to diversify engineering, limited attention has been paid to the trajectories of Black women in STEM education scholarship. To address this gap, we asked two research questions about a STEM-subdisciplinary field in this empirical study. The first question focuses on cultural (in)congruence as it exists across the individual, academic, and societal domains for a group of Black women engineering students; while the second focuses on what higher education institutions can learn from the experiences of cultural (in)congruence to establish thriving academic environments for Black women engineering students. We define cultural congruence as the process of finding an individual’s identities, values, beliefs, and practices to be mirrored and/or reflected in their environment. This is a critical concept because of the cognitive and emotional labor that is exerted when minoritized individuals code-switch. Drawing from the ecological framework of Bronfenbrenner, we explored cultural (in)congruence across the micro- (individual), meso-(academic), and macro-system (societal) realms. We used a qualitative, case study approach, involving 45 one-time interviews with Black women undergraduate students from a single university. After conducting a qualitative analysis, we arrived at four major findings: (1) for Black women, cultural congruence is often a self-initiated pursuit found in non-engineering spaces; (2) while students were able to find congruence across individual, academic, and societal domains, this was often forged at a personal cost to themselves; (3) students anchored in strong individual culture were better suited to endure the incongruence across academic and societal realms; and (4) there is much room for higher education institutions to make engineering environments less culturally taxing for minoritized Black students.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1114-1128
Number of pages15
JournalInternational Journal of Engineering Education
Volume40
Issue number5
StatePublished - 2024
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Black women
  • cultural congruence
  • ecological systems
  • engineering
  • undergraduate students

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Education
  • General Engineering

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