Board 220: CAREER: ‘Support our Troops’: Re-storying Student Veteran and Service Member Deficit in Engineering Through Professional Formation and Community Advocacy: YEAR 3

There is an urgent need to recruit, retain, train, and sustain a diverse engineering workforce able to meet the socio-technical and environmental challenges of 21st century society. Together, student veterans and service members (SVSM) are a unique yet understudied group that comprises substantial numbers of those historically underrepresented in engineering based on their race, ethnicity, gender, or ability. That, in combination with technical interests and skills, maturity and life experience, and leadership and teamwork training, makes SVSM ideal candidates for helping engineering education meet these demands. This NSF CAREER project aims to advance full participation of SVSM within higher engineering education and the engineering workforce. The project plan comprises a 1) Research Plan to develop deeper understandings about how SVSM participate, persist, and produce professional identities in engineering education, and an 2) Education Plan to place new understandings into practice through collaborative development, implementation, and broad dissemination of an evidence-based orientation, community building and mentorship workshop for SVSM in engineering, and a set of modularized awareness/support training materials to introduce engineering faculty, staff, and administrators, and the general engineering student populace to military student issues. The research plan builds from previous work using a longitudinal, narrative inquiry research approach and an innovative, two-strand theoretical framework. In doing so, it aims to both critically examine higher engineering education structures and interpretively explore SVSM professional identity development in engineering programs at 2- and 4- year public institutions in the western United States. The education plan draws from both grounded theory methods and design based research approaches. Concurrent with the research plan, the education plan works to connect local theory to practice by characterizing the current support structures available for SVSM in engineering and higher education, and implementing new supports based on SVSM identities and both required and preferred resources. This paper reports on project activities conducted and substantial outcomes during project YEAR 3. Specifically, the following activities and outcomes are described: 1) Research Plan: qualitative thematic and narrative findings centered on institutional structure and professional identity development and constructed from SVSM personal narrative journal entries and one-on-one narrative interviews, 2) Education Plan: progress to-date oncollaboratively developed and member-checked military student awareness training for engineering faculty, staff, administration, and students, and 3) Education Plan: preliminary findings from early activities to develop an engineering workshop to support SVSM and other post-traditional students navigate and find community within their engineering degree program.