Transforming academic organizations to be more equitable and inclusive requires a range of change agents working together and engaging in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Central to this DEI work is learning how to create change. Yet, change agents do not always know at the outset what resources are necessary to enact change; they often acquire the necessary resources and skills over time. This research paper investigates how change agents participating in a community of practice (CoP) across academic institutions learn about and mobilize resources to transform engineering education.
This analysis of resource mobilization mechanisms comes from research with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) grant recipient teams. To date, 26 teams have been funded through the RED mechanism to create revolutionary organizational and cultural changes within their departments with the goal of improving equity, inclusion, and educational outcomes. Projects vary in how they define and the degree to which they focus on equity.
We find that resource mobilization practices in the CoP center and strengthen DEI values in two main ways. Firstly, participants learn about and gain access to resources that are explicitly DEIrelated: they mobilize resources to advance equity at the institutional level as an outcome of the projects and collaborate on additional projects to embed DEI into the process of change-making itself, starting from the initial stages of writing a proposal. Secondly, the way participants engage with each other, and approach change goals puts equity and inclusion into practice: participants identify and tackle structural barriers to change through DEI-aligned behaviors, from addressing how institutional circumstances create resistance to DEI, to developing a shared vision for systemic change that is inclusive and collaborative.
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Exploring NSF-Funded Evaluators’ and Principal Investigators’ Definitions and Measurement of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
More evaluators have anchored their work in equity-focused, culturally responsive, and social justice ideals. Although we have a sense of approaches that guide evaluators as to how they should attend to culture, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), we have not yet established an empirical understanding of how evaluators measure DEI. In this article, we report an examination of how evaluators and principal investigators (PIs) funded by the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program define and measure DEI within their projects. Evaluators gathered the most evidence related to diversity and less evidence related to equity and inclusion. On average, PIs’ projects engaged in activities designed to increase DEI, with the highest focus on diversity. We believe there continues to be room for improvement and implore the movement of engagement with these important topics from the margins to the center of our field's education, theory, and practice.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10383255
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Journal of Evaluation
- Volume:
- 44
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1098-2140
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 50-73
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Background This paper begins with the premise that ethics and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) overlap in engineering. Yet, the topics of ethics and DEI often inhabit different scholarly spaces in engineering education, thus creating a divide between these topics in engineering education research, teaching, and practice.
Purpose We investigate the research question, “How are ethics and DEI explicitly connected in peer‐reviewed literature in engineering education and closely related fields?”
Design We used systematic review procedures to synthesize intersections between ethics and DEI in engineering education scholarly literature. We extracted literature from engineering and engineering education databases and used thematic analysis to identify ethics/DEI connections.
Results We identified three primary themes (each with three sub‐themes): (1) lenses that serve to connect ethics and DEI (social, justice‐oriented, professional), (2) roots that inform how ethics and DEI connect in engineering (individual demographics, disciplinary cultures, institutional cultures); and (3) engagement strategies for promoting ethics and DEI connections in engineering (affinity toward ethics/DEI content, understanding diverse stakeholders, working in diverse teams).
Conclusions There is a critical mass of engineering education scholars explicitly exploring connections between ethics and DEI in engineering. Based on this review, potential benefits of integrating ethics and DEI in engineering include cultivating a socially just world and shifting engineering culture to be more inclusive and equitable, thus accounting for the needs and values of students and faculty from diverse backgrounds.
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