The EECS Student Experience Story Archive Project | Purpose
ABOUT
The EECS Student Experience Story Archive Project (SESAP) is a forum created to raise awareness for engineering education and industry leaders about what is needed to best support the success and empowerment of EECS students from historically underserved communities based on race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, first-generation status, gender identity, sexual orientation and/or disability. In this special archive, students who identify themselves as members of one or more of these communities offer their narrative testimonies and unique insights to illuminate opportunities for program and institutional transformation to incorporate the agency of more diverse perspectives and advocate for diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice in engineering education and the engineering profession.
THE PEOPLE
The narratives included in this archive are auto-ethnographic testimonios. The term auto-ethnography designates the agency exercised by each of the participants appearing in the archive as the authors of their own stories that center on their experiences of culture, identity, and power. The term testimonio further designates the type of narratives offered here as accounts that bear witness and testify about events, including injustices, that have powerfully impacted the lives of individuals and communities. We believe these accounts have important implications not only for the School of EECS at Oregon State University but also for institutions of engineering education and for the discipline of engineering more broadly.
Each of the recordings appearing in the archive is approximately 20-30 minutes in length and was created using Zoom. The individual authors tell their own stories and make selections about most important aspects to include about their experiences based on a basic framework of guiding prompts focusing on: their identity; influential community and cultural background leading up to their educational experiences; accounts of the intersection of identity, community, culture, power, and their experience in engineering education programs; strengths they bring to these programs as individuals and members of their communities, and recommendations for future changes or actions in support of students from underserved communities. After a brief introduction from the SESAP project organizer, each of the individual authors primarily appears speaking on their own for the duration of the recording.
OUR GOAL
On behalf of the EECS SESAP program organizers and all of its co-authors, we hope that you will view this archive as a tool to better understand the experiences of engineering students from historically underserved communities, that you will appreciate the agency of each of the individual authors included to voice significant aspects of their own stories, and that you will consider how you can also support them and others by leveraging new understanding gained in actions to pursue positive change in engineering education.