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Call without Response: Faculty Perceptions about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

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Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

ERM: Find Out More About Faculty!

Page Count

16

DOI

10.18260/1-2--41043

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/41043

Download Count

535

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Paper Authors

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Kaitlyn Thomas University of Nevada, Reno

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Kaitlyn is an engineering education doctoral student at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her background is in civil engineering. Her research focus is women in engineering and mental health.

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Derrick Satterfield University of Nevada, Reno

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Derrick Satterfield is a doctoral candidate in Engineering Education at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research focuses on engineering graduate students' experiences and motivation centered on career planning and preparation.

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Jeanne Sanders University of Nevada, Reno

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Jeanne Sanders (she/her/hers) is a postdoctoral researcher in Engineering Education at Arizona State University. She graduated with her Ph.D from North Carolina State University in the Fall of 2020. She is pursuing a career supporting socially just causes. Her research interests include raising awareness for and supporting students, faculty, and staff with gender-expansive, romantic, and sexual minority identities.

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Adam Kirn University of Nevada, Reno

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Kelly Cross University of Nevada, Reno

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Dr. Kelly J. Cross is a data-informed, transformational mission-focused culturally responsive practitioner, researcher, and educational leader. She earned her Bachelors of Science in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University in 2007 and Masters of Science in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Cincinnati in 2011. Cross completed her doctoral program in the Engineering Education department at Virginia Tech in 2015 and worked as a post-doctoral researcher with the Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Dr. Cross worked in the Department of Bioengineering working to redesign the curriculum through the NSF funded Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) grant. She is a member of the ASEE Leadership Virtual Community of Practice (LVCP) that organizes and facilitates Safe Zone Training workshops. Dr. Cross has conducted workshops on managing personal bias in STEM, online and in-person, in addition to faculty training on power and privilege. Her research interests include diversity and inclusion in STEM, intersectionality, teamwork and communication skills, assessment, and identity construction. Her teaching philosophy focuses on student centered approaches such as problem-based learning and culturally relevant pedagogy. Dr. Cross’ complimentary professional activities promote inclusive excellence through collaboration. She is an NSF CAREER awardee, delivered multiple distinguished lectures, and has received a national mentoring award.

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Abstract

Current and historical sociopolitical national events have brought diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to the forefront of discussion in academia. In response to this surge in social awareness of DEI, universities nationwide put forth plans and proposals for inclusive campus communities and initiatives to promote diversity. Educators, including engineering faculty, play a critical role in guiding students through these complex conversations. Based on this responsibility, we need to understand the state of faculty’s knowledge levels and willingness to engage in these topics. The purpose of this study is to perform a systematic literature review of engineering education journals and conference proceedings to answer the research question: What themes emerge in current and previous EER on engineering faculty readiness to address DEI topics in their programs and classrooms? Our literature review consisted of a search through three conference-paper and five journal-article databases for faculty beliefs about DEI from 2000 to 2021. Any student-centered studies and non-engineering faculty studies were excluded. Once a preliminary set of articles was found, we performed secondary and tertiary rounds of exclusion to compile a set of 22 articles that addressed our research question. This limited number of articles demonstrates that faculty beliefs about DEI are not commonly studied or discussed in engineering education research (EER). Because DEI is an essential topic in education and engineering, this result suggests a significant gap in EER community knowledge. With this gap in mind, we thematically analyzed the 22 articles that met the inclusion criteria to understand what faculty beliefs EER has focused on. The main result of this analysis was our proposed model, the Problematization-to-Action Continuum (PTAC), which highlights faculty’s readiness to make change efforts toward promoting DEI. The PTAC model is a single-axis continuum that contains three defined points (each end and the center). On one end, engineering faculty do not acknowledge there are problems concerning DEI, and there are no actions taken toward bettering these issues. In the center, faculty acknowledge that there are problems but feel they lack knowledge to take actionable steps to alleviate them. On the other end, faculty recognize patterns of inequity and actively intervene to promote inclusive practices. The largest grouping of papers on the PTAC (N=11 of 22) was located at the center of the model, revealing that there is an acknowledgement of the need for increased DEI efforts, but little action has been taken toward these efforts. Overall, this literature review showed that there is an understanding of the responsibility to act regarding DEI efforts but a lack of knowledge or resources to execute and sustain DEI practices and policies. Future work involves investigating faculty’s role in action plans for DEI policy change. By addressing faculty’s role in these initiatives, we can support engineering faculty to engage in meaningful dialogue with all stakeholders and implement research-based strategies for improving DEI in their local academic institutions. The collective impact of strategically including faculty in DEI efforts will further the national conversation about the importance of DEI to make lasting change in our educational system.

Thomas, K., & Satterfield, D., & Sanders, J., & Kirn, A., & Cross, K. (2022, August), Call without Response: Faculty Perceptions about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41043

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