Invisible innovators: how low-income, first-generation students use their funds of knowledge to belong in engineering

ABSTRACT

Though engineering is often perceived as a pathway of upward mobility in the United States, very little is known about the experiences of undergraduate engineering students who come from low-income backgrounds or are the first in their families to attend college. The little research that does exist on low-income, first-generation (LIFG) engineering students is grounded in a deficiency perspective that emphasizes the barriers these students face: greater feelings of financial pressure and curriculum overload, along with lower family support, confidence in technical skill sets, satisfaction with instructors and satisfaction with the overall college experience. Our ethnographic research with LIFG students at a public engineering university and community college reveals that these barriers can create a sense of belonging uncertainty for them as engineering students. Yet our students were also able to draw on the funds of knowledge they acquired growing up in poor families and, when these funds of knowledge are validated, they establish a sense of belonging in engineering education and the profession.

KEYWORDS:

• socioeconomic class
• first-generation students
• funds of knowledge
• belonging uncertainty

Acknowledgement

This study was funded by National Science Foundation [1354087].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹Foor, Walden, and Trytten, “I Wish That I Belonged More in This Whole Engineering Group,” 2007, p. 104.

²Foor, Walden, and Trytten, “I Wish That I Belonged More in This Whole Engineering Group,” 2007, p. 108.

³Foor, Walden, and Trytten, “I Wish That I Belonged More in This Whole Engineering Group,” 2007, p. 107.

⁴Lundy-Wagner et al., “Gaining Access or Losing Ground?” 2014.

⁵For example, see Foor, Walden, and Trytten, “I Wish That I Belonged More in This Whole Engineering Group,” 2007; Lundy-Wagner et al., “Gaining Access or Losing Ground?,” 2014; Martin, Simmons, and Yu, “The Role of Social Capital in the Experiences of Hispanic Women Engineering Majors,” 2013; Mejia, “A Sociocultural Analysis of Latino High School Students' Funds of Knowledge and Implications”, 2014; Slaton, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering, 2010; Slaton, “Ambiguous Reform,” 2010; Trenor et al., “The Relations of Ethnicity to Female Engineering Students' Educational Experiences and College and Career Plans in an Ethnically Diverse Learning Environment,” 2008.

⁶Slaton, “Ambiguous Reform,” 2010, p. 10.

⁷Martin, Miller, and Simmons, “Exploring the Theoretical Social Capital ‘Deficit’ of First Generation College Students,” 2014; Packard et al., “Women's Experiences in the STEM Community College Transfer Pathway,” 2011; Simmons and Martin, “Developing Effective Engineering Fictive Kin to Support Undergraduate First-Generation College Students,” 2014; Smith and Lucena, “‘How do I show them I'm more than a person who can lift heavy things?’ The Funds of Knowledge of Low Income, First Generation Engineering Students,” 2016.

⁸Strutz et al., “Low Socioeconomic Status Individuals,” 2012.

⁹Ohland et al., “Viewing Access and Persistence in Engineering Through a Socioeconomic Lens,” 2012, p. 158.

¹⁰Smith and Lucena, “‘How do I show them I'm more than a person who can lift heavy things?’ The Funds of Knowledge of Low Income, First Generation Engineering Students,” 2016.

¹¹Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti, Funds of Knowledge, 2005; Moll et al., “Funds of Knowledge for Teaching,” 1992; Vélez-Ibáñez and Greenberg, “Formation and Transformation of Funds,” 1992.

¹²Walton and Cohen, “A Question of Belonging,” 2007.

¹³Stout and Wright, “Drilling Down to Better Understand First Generation Students' Patterns of Success in Computing,” 2015.

¹⁴Ohland et al., “Viewing Access and Persistence in Engineering Through a Socioeconomic Lens,” 2012, p. 163.

¹⁵Chen, “Students Who Study Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) in Postsecondary Education,” 2009; Strutz et al., “Low Socioeconomic Status Individuals,” 2012, p. 144.

¹⁶Lundy-Wagner et al., “Gaining Access or Losing Ground?” 2014; Ohland et al., “Viewing Access and Persistence in Engineering Through a Socioeconomic Lens,” 2012.

¹⁷Strutz et al., “Low Socioeconomic Status Individuals,” 2012, p. 147.

¹⁸Donaldson, Lichtenstein, and Sheppard, “Socioeconomic Status and the Undergraduate Engineering Experience,” 2008.

¹⁹McLoughlin, “Community Colleges, Engineering, and Social Justice,” 2012.

²⁰Valencia, Dismantling Contemporary Deficit Thinking, 2010.

²¹Moll et al., “Funds of Knowledge for Teaching,” 1992, p. 133. Other scholars working from critical race theory use the term community cultural wealth to refer to the ‘array of knowledge, skills, abilities, and contacts possessed and utilized by Communities of Color to survive and resist macro and micro-forms of oppression’. Yosso, “Whose Culture Has Capital?”, 2005, p. 77.

²²Donaldson et al., “Socioeconomic Status and the Undergraduate Engineering Experience,” 2008; Ohland et al., “Viewing Access and Persistence in Engineering Through a Socioeconomic Lens,” 2012.

²³Descartes and Rudd, “Changing Landscapes of Work and Family,” 2008; Ortner, “New Jersey Dreaming,” 2003.

²⁴Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” 1989.

²⁵We use the Location, Knowledge, Desire framework developed by Downey and Lucena to initially establish the positionality of our students with respect to their peers, their institution, and the forms of knowledge that exist in and are absent from it. See Downey and Lucena, “National Identities in Multinational Worlds,” 2005 and Downey et al., “The Globally Competent Engineer,” 2006.

²⁶Vincenti's research on the development in flush riveting in aeronautical engineering makes the case for practical knowledge especially clearly:

When riveting was found lacking in tightness it was avoided in structural critical locations. As time went on, shopworkers and engineers learned, frequently to their dismay, the idiosyncrasies and intractabilities of different materials in different situations [and] which kind of tool best suited a particular operation … You can't build an airplane from the drawings. By the nature of things, some of what had been learned about flush riveting could only remain in the neuromuscular skills of the workers and the intuitive judgment of the engineers. (What Engineers Know and How They Know It, 1993, pp. 187–188, emphasis added)

²⁷Bandura, “Self-efficacy,” 1977.

²⁸For a historical overview of the mental/manual split in engineering education, see Rolston and Cox, “Engineering by Doing,” 2015; Reynolds, The Engineer in America, 1991; Seely, “Research, Engineering, and Science in American Engineering Colleges,” 1993.

²⁹The difficulty in measuring skills from people who have no measurable proxies, such as years of education or formal qualifications, has led to an artificial dichotomy of skilled vs. unskilled in labor and economic sociology literatures. Only recently sociologists have begun to study skills among the ‘unskilled’. See Hagan, Hernandez-Leon, and Demonsant, Skills of the “Unskilled”, 2015. Studying engineering skills among supposedly ‘unskilled’ students and practitioners is fertile ground for engineering studies scholars.

³⁰Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti, Funds of Knowledge, 2005.

³¹Slaton, “Ambiguous Reform,” 2010.

³²Rolston and Cox, “Engineering by Doing,” 2015; Reynolds, The Engineer in America, 1991; Seely, “Research, Engineering, and Science in American Engineering Colleges,” 1993; Slaton, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering, 2010; Zussman, Mechanics of the Middle Class, 1985.

³³Foor, Walden, and Trytten, “I Wish That I Belonged More in This Whole Engineering Group,” 2007, p. 113.