Promoting Equitable Pathways in Engineering and Career Technical Education

Abstract

My dissertation addresses three studies which ask broadly: What are the predictive metrics of functioning AS-CTE pathways? Can students’ perceptions of these pathways be changed? Are these pathways equitable for female students?

In my first study, I take a step toward better understanding the metrics that explain functioning AS-CTE pathways. Through ethnography, I observed that when social mobility was added as a metric of high-quality PBL with AS-CTE in a predictive framework of education success, attendance levels improved.

In my second study, I investigated an opportunity gap (Ladson-Billings, 2013) contributing to students’ perceptions that AS-CTE does not lead to advanced STEM degrees. That perception forms a resistance to AS-CTE pathways, hindering efforts to include underrepresented demographics such as women. This study aims to explain to what degree the opportunity gap influences perceptions of obscure high-wage, high-skill careers by youth of an underrepresented demographic.

In my final study, I investigated how AS-CTE pathways present barriers to inclusion through hegemonic masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Building on the work of (Tarantino et al., 2016), this study employs a feminization of PBL mentor intervention to help break down the barriers of hegemonic masculinity in secondary STEM-CTE classrooms. Through ethnographic action research (Hartmann et al., 2009), I found evidence that the humanizing of our VDC-PBL intervention allowed for sites of resistance to gender norms.

These studies make three important and timely contributions to the field of AS-CTE and engineering education more broadly. First, I uncover and remediate an ineffective metric of program efficacy, then reveal an opportunity gap which impacts marginalized youth more acutely, and finally I reveal a toxic masculinity within AS-CTE pathways which further impacts those with compounding marginalizations. While uncovering these trends, I offer recommendations to remediate these issues, while also highlighting what is working for these pathways.