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Engineering educators in many contexts are increasingly being called to contribute to equity. The focus of our CAREER project is to investigate the ways in which engineering faculty, staff and administrators think about the cause of gender- and race-based minoritization in engineering. Specifically, we investigate the beliefs they express about why women and people of color remain minoritized in engineering and how they arrive at those beliefs. Long term goals of the work include designing evidence-based professional development that can support faculty at any stage in their development as change agents for equity in engineering. The overarching project design includes a series of four one-on-one interviews with participants. The first two interviews are focused on their beliefs about gender- and race-based minoritization, respectively. The third interview will explore their narrative, and the fourth interview (or some type of interaction) will be designed based on how the project evolves and what we learn. We are currently in the second year of the project. To start, our research team used crowdsourcing as a method of recruiting our participants. We asked students to identify engineering educators that they considered to be inclusive based on their lived experience. We oversampled for students from minoritized groups (non-male, non-white). We also allowed those nominated by students to refer to any peers that they felt were inclusive. This resulted in the following participant pool with at least one majority identity (race or gender): 11 white men, 11 white women, and 5 men of color. After piloting our initial interview protocol, we completed gender beliefs interviews with all 27 participants during the 2020-2021 academic year. We had the interviews transcribed, and members of our research checked them for accuracy and de-identified them. The clean transcripts were then sent back to the participants for review. We began data condensation by generating a summary sheet for each participant, which includes the main concepts captured in each section of their gender beliefs interview. We are currently (2021-2022) conducting race beliefs interviews with those same participants. We published the results of piloting the use of our methodological framework, Thinking as Argument (TaA) in the 2021 ASEE proceedings. In short, we believe the framework shows promise for studying beliefs at a deeper level by inviting participants to work through the types of evidence they draw on to commit to their beliefs about the cause of minoritization in engineering. In this paper, we offer some insights that are emerging at this early stage of the project: Different participants draw on diverse ways of knowing to commit to their beliefs, including lived experience and scholarship. These ways of knowing seem potentially related to their own identities. For example, several participants who identify as men of color leverage their own experiences with racism to explain the cause of sexism. This insight has given us pause on the ways in which our framework, TaA, privileges academic or argumentative ways of knowing. We are gaining awareness of the incredible complexity that exists within trying to characterize or evaluate someone's contributions to equity as they relate to their ways of thinking. This finding has given us a pause about the ways in which we, as researchers, assign value to ways of being or acting. At this current stage, we are exploring further by engaging ourselves in reflection of other ways in which beliefs in this context are formed and we are inviting others to do the same. Future work will include ongoing analysis and sensemaking. With the race beliefs completed, we will be able to use data display techniques to explore any patterns between the participants’ beliefs and positionalities. We look forward to honing our protocol for the narrative interviews and are soliciting feedback in terms of how to use the fourth and final interaction of the project in a more participatory way to encourage and give back to our participants. 

When it comes to engaging with complex, social problems, it is important to be aware of not only what one believes, but also why one believes it. Plus, focusing on beliefs about the cause of a social phenomenon (e.g., what one believes causes inequitable participation of women in engineering) rather than just beliefs about the phenomena itself (e.g., what one believes about the extent to which gender inequity exists in engineering) is an important contribution to broadening participation because one’s causal beliefs relate to their ideas about what needs to happen to make engineering more equitable. In this paper, we describe our use of Thinking as Argument (TaA) as a promising theoretical framework for exploring how engineering educators arrive at their beliefs about the cause of gender-based inequity in engineering. According to TaA, the type of robust argument that is desirable for one to commit to their beliefs about the cause of complex social phenomena includes five distinct components: causal theory, evidence, counterargument, counterevidence, and rebuttal. By conducting interviews about gender-based inequity using TaA, we can explore 1) the ways in which individuals articulate their causal beliefs as arguments of varying sophistication, and 2) the ways in which individuals use evidence to commit to their beliefs. In this contribution, we: describe TaA as a framework, document how we used TaA in a pilot study to inform our ongoing research on engineering faculty’s causal beliefs, and provide initial evidence for TaA theory as a novel methodological contribution for studying beliefs related to equity in engineering. Specifically, our use of TaA revealed that while each participant offered a belief in a system-level cause of gender-based minoritization, there was considerable variation in the ways in which they used evidence to arrive at their beliefs and in their epistemological orientation toward gender-based inequities in engineering. We believe there is value in the use of TaA to study beliefs because ultimately, when we increase our explicit awareness of our commitment to our causal beliefs, we are better able to behave in ways that align with our beliefs and to develop agency to disrupt oppression.