NCID-1853
Rachel Friedensen
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Iowa State University
Education/Degree:
1 Educational Policy & Leadership (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
About
Rachel Friedensen recently received her PhD in educational policy and leadership from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her concentration was higher education. She received her BA in history from Bryn Mawr College and her MA in history from Western Michigan University. Her past research has focused on institutional policy analysis with an emphasis on diversity policy and STEM pathways for students with disabilities in higher education. She is currently a postdoctoral research associate in the School of Education at Iowa State University, where she is studying undergraduate engineering identity development in a changing electrical and computer engineering department.
Current Work
Dr. Friedensen is currently a postdoctoral research associate at Iowa State University, where she is working on a Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) grant from the National Science Foundation with Dr. Sarah Rodriguez. She is studying the ways that undergraduate students in electrical and computer engineering develop identities as engineers and the ways that the introduction of design thinking and systems thinking may impact those identities. Dr. Friedensen is also working on extending her dissertation research, which used policy discourse analysis to examine institutional diversity policies, as well as planning new studies about the experiences of individuals with disabilities in graduate school and the professoriate.
Research Area Keyword(s)
disability, discourse analysis, higher education, poststructuralist theory, qualitative research, STEM