Asian Identity in the Online Classroom

ABSTRACT

During the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Asian American students in higher education were faced not only with the move to online learning but the nuances that came with anti-Asian rhetoric and violence in the news. We wanted to understand how the sociopolitical effects of the past two years have affected Asian American engineering students through their experiences in the online setting, as well as highlight the gaps of Asian American engineering students in engineering education research. Using qualitative methods through semi-structured interviews with Asian and Asian American engineering students, we explore Asian and Asian American identity, and sociopolitical matters in the engineering classroom. To understand the views of Asian and Asian American students, we lay out the ways that racial and ethnic identity have been examined in engineering, along with Asian and Asian American identity formation. In this paper, we explore the background of race and equality in engineering and engineering education. Then we look at the results of our interviews, focusing on two main areas. First we look at how students formed social networks and build their identities in these online spaces. Then we look at the role of politicization in the classroom and in engineering and how it relates to Asian identity formation. We close this paper by speculating how Asian and Asian American identity can be better addressed and attended to within engineering education. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.