Theorizing can contribute to marginalized students' agency in engineering persistence.

Abstract

Within research on retention and persistence in STEM, the concept of student agency is typically treated as a personal characteristic or as an element of coping and navigational strategies. The act of theorizing about one's own experiences and persistence is under-explored as a source of taking agency. Through interviews with a woman in the first year of an undergraduate engineering major, we examine the role that theorizing about engineering culture and her own experiences plays in her constructing a narrative of persistence that counters the prominent perceived narratives marginalizing her position in engineering.