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1. Enacting Identities: Participatory Design as a Context for Youth to Reflect, Project, and Apply their Emerging Identities

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3311927.3323148  

   Coenraad, Merijke; Palmer, Jen; Franklin, Diana; Weintrop, David (January 2019, Proceedings of Interaction Design and Children)

   Participatory design is an essential design strategy for creating artifacts and experiences that reflect the voices of the population being designed for and with. The participatory design process can serve not only to research resulting artifacts but also as an empowering activity for those who participate. This paper explores how participatory design can serve as a context for young participants to enact and voice their emerging identities and reveals how different participatory design activities have unique affordances for supporting this identity enactment. Focusing on a group of 12 and 13-year-old African American girls, this paper presents a case study showing how participatory design activities served as venues for the girls to reflect characteristics of their current identities, project future identities, and apply aspects of their identities to shape materials for others. In doing so, we contribute a case study showing how participatory design allows participants to enact their identities, helping researchers gain insight into characteristics of those they are designing with and for. This paper advances our understanding of participatory design as a design approach for youth, especially as it relates to issues of broadening participation, identity, and equity. 

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2. Mobilizing Resources in a Community of Practice: How Academic Change Agents Work Toward Equity in their Change Projects

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--43936  

   Güler, S.; Litzler, E.; Margherio, C.; Williams, J.M.; Andrijcic, E.; Mohan, S. (June 2023, Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education)

   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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3. Board 281: Examining Scripts of Whiteness in Engineering Education

   Chen, Diana A.; Hoople, Gordon D.; Mejia, Joel Alejandro; Lord, Susan M. (June 2023, ASEE annual conference exposition)

   Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Racial Equity in STEM Education Program, this project aims to deeply interrogate the influence and pervasiveness of Whiteness in engineering culture. While there has been substantial research into the masculinity of engineering, Whiteness has received far less attention. We claim the centrality of Whiteness in engineering curricula informs the culture, climate, and discourse of engineering education, leading to an exclusionary culture within engineering as reflected by the lack of diversity and lower retention of students and faculty of color, and contributes to systemic barriers negatively impacting racial equity. Moving towards racial equity in engineering education requires a fundamental shift in thinking in two important ways: 1) we must reframe how we think about underserved populations from minority to minoritized by a dominant discourse, and 2) to begin to dismantle the impacts of Whiteness, we must first make this barrier visible. In the first year of this project, the diverse team of PIs began to explore scripts of Whiteness in engineering education by conducting a collaborative autoethnography through documenting and analyzing their own experiences facing, enacting, and challenging scripts of Whiteness in engineering spaces. A collaborative autoethnography (CAE) takes a collaborative approach to the process of critical self reflection and can be conducted in many forms, such as such as collecting personal memory data (e.g., journaling), interviewing each other, facilitating intentional dialogue, or observing each other (e.g., in the classroom). CAE is not a linear process, but requires an ongoing dialogue (conversations, negotiations, or even arguments) between researcher team members over a long period (at least months, if not years). Our diverse viewpoints and years-long experience working together facilitated rich conversations that let us interrogate the ways in which Whiteness reveals its form differently depending on one’s positionality. In the later years of the project, we will create a faculty development program intended to help engineering faculty develop their critical consciousness and begin to decenter Whiteness from their ways of thinking and discourses (i.e., beliefs, attitudes, value systems, actions, etc.) so they can begin to critically think about promoting and enacting practices that move engineering education toward racial equity. Although the pathway to critical consciousness is not linear, it is a one-way street; once faculty begin to see the systemic barriers (such as those created by scripts of Whiteness) around them, there is no going back. In the long term, we hope to lay the groundwork for recognizing, interrogating, and eventually dismantling forces of systemic oppression in engineering higher education. 

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4. Equitable Data Governance Models for the Participatory Sciences

   https://doi.org/10.1029/2022CSJ000025  

   Cooper, Caren; Martin, Vincent; Wilson, Omega; Rasmussen, Lisa (May 2023, Community Science)

   Abstract When participants share data to a central entity, those who have taken on the responsibility of accepting the data and handling its management may also have control of decisions about the data, including its use, re‐use, accessibility, and more. Such concentrated control of data is often a default practice across many forms of participatory sciences, which can be extractive in some contexts and a way to protect participants in other contexts. To avoid extractive practices and related harms, projects can adopt structures so that those who make decisions about the data set and/or each datum are different from those responsible forexecutingthe subsequent decisions about data management. We propose two alternative models for improving equity in data governance, each model representing a spectrum of options. With an individualized control model, each participant can place their data in a central repository while still retaining control of it, such as through simple opt‐in or opt‐out features or through blockchain technology. With a shared control model, representatives of salient participant groups, such as through participant advisory boards, collectively make decisions on behalf of their constituents. These equitable models are relevant to all participatory science systems, and particularly necessary in contexts where dominant‐culture institutions engage marginalized peoples. 

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5. Stakeholder Views in Building a Sustainable Engineering Learning Ecosystem: Afterschool Green Energy, Robotics, and Automation

   Allison Antink-Meyer, Matthew Aldeman (June 2023, Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education 2023 Annual Conference)

   This research was part of the first year of a National Science Foundation funded project aimed at promoting high school students’ interest in green energy, robotics, automation and postsecondary engineering and technology study. High school teachers, undergraduate majors in STEM areas, and community based non-profit organizations were involved in this afterschool engineering program for high school students with the goal of broadening participation among minoritized groups in engineering and engineering technology. This study investigated how these different stakeholders’ views aligned and diverged about (1) the characteristics of STEM engagement, and (2) the factors that influence the development of engineering identities. The purpose of this investigation was to uncover the relationships between community members’ viewpoints, community assets, and the positionality of the project personnel. 

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