Exploring the Enterprise Knowledge of Black Males in Undergraduate Engineering Programs

Background: Though the relationship between engineering and commercial enterprise has been documented for well over the last century, there is little research that addresses how students, and specifically Black males, make meaning of this relationship.

Purpose/Hypothesis: In this study, we explored interview data from 20 Black male engineering students from across the United States to understand how they construct enterprise related knowledge.

Design/Method: As a product of an overarching Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis project, this study involved secondary analysis of interview data. After conducting three stages (descriptive, linguistic, and conceptual) of analysis, two themes were constructed.

Results: The findings consisted of two knowledge constructs that were developed from participants’ accounts. The Educational Construct defined how participants described enterprise related learning and the Economic Construct demonstrated participants’ knowledge of the economic enterprise of engineering.

Conclusions: These findings demonstrate participants’ ability to develop meaningful educational and economic constructs, and they showcase Black males in engineering education as assets to the field. Implications of this study include opportunities for undergraduate engineering students to gain and apply formal enterprise knowledge and future research which primarily and intentionally assesses the process and product of engineering students’ construction of enterprise-related knowledge.