(517g) Professional Identity and Community Development with the Story Collider

Persistence of students in STEM programs is linked to students' identification with their profession and with their sense of belonging. In this work we describe personal storytelling interventions developed with The Story Collider, a national storytelling non-profit. These curricular interventions arose from a need to meet ABET Outcome 3 (an ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences) in a Thermodynamics course, and have grown into a multidisciplinary collaboration measuring the impact in belonging, persistence, and student support networks that result from the writing and sharing of personal stories related to ones' major. We describe quantitative shifts in attitudes related to confidence in subject material and identification with ones' major, and discuss qualitative correlations with the themes that emerge from student stories and in anonymized interviews. We conclude with a practical menu of classroom activities from small Scientist Spotlights and medium-sized story-writing activities that can be applied across undergraduate and graduate engineering curricula.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant IUSE-2142137.