Learning from Practitioners That Support Underrepresented Students in Engineering

Creating an inclusive and supportive learning environment is challenging due to the range of issues faced by diverse students. To facilitate efforts to help students, it is important that educators understand the factors that influence their ability to effectively offer support. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the concepts that underpin student support efforts in engineering. The authors address this purpose by investigating the beliefs of student support practitioners that regularly work with students from underrepresented groups. The authors used prevailing student development theory to analyze data from 17 interviews with student support practitioners across four universities. The findings suggest that there are four major themes that inform the decision making of student support practitioners: (1)context, (2)agency, (3)process, and (4)impact. Taken together, these concepts provide an organizing framework for advancing understanding about supporting underrepresented students in engineering.