Connection and alienation during the COVID-19 pandemic: The narratives of four engineering students

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted, exacerbated, and caused many challenges within engineering education. At the same time, the pandemic provided opportunities for engineering educators to learn from forced change to promote strategic efforts to improve classroom engagement and connection to better support engineering students. Purpose: We leveraged students' stories to discuss ways university administrators, faculty, and instructors can better support their students during times of global crisis and beyond the current pandemic. Design/Method: We conducted longitudinal narrative interviews with four White women engineering students from different universities in their third and fourth years. The students were selected from a larger research project because their rich and reflective stories resonated with other participant narratives, the research team, and ongoing conversations about educating during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Through narrative inquiry, we constructed “restoryed” vignettes and identified patterns within the four students' distinctive stories by drawing on a theoretical framework designed to examine connection and alienation. Results: The findings provided insights into how students were stressed and disconnected from their education in undesirable ways. The findings also provide insight into how those same students received support and maintained a connection to their institution, advisors, and instructors that educators could emulate. Conclusions: Our theoretical framework of connection and alienation proved helpful for understanding the experiences of four engineering students. Additionally, these stories provide practical examples of how faculty and staff can support student connections beyond the pandemic.