TY - JOUR
T1 - Cultural (In)Congruence
T2 - How Black Women Navigate Individual, Academic, and Societal Dimensions of Engineering
AU - Coley, Brooke
AU - Hailu, Meseret F.
AU - Kwarase, Prince K.
AU - Tsotniashvili, Keti
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 TEMPUS Publications.
PY - 2024
Y1 - 2024
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Black women
KW - cultural congruence
KW - ecological systems
KW - engineering
KW - undergraduate students
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M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85205972055
SN - 0949-149X
VL - 40
SP - 1114
EP - 1128
JO - International Journal of Engineering Education
JF - International Journal of Engineering Education
IS - 5
ER -