Using Diversity Statements To Promote Engagement With Diversity And Teaching
- Conference
- Location
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Chicago, Illinois
- Publication Date
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June 18, 2006
- Start Date
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June 18, 2006
- End Date
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June 21, 2006
- ISSN
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2153-5965
- Conference Session
- Tagged Division
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Minorities in Engineering
- Page Count
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26
- Page Numbers
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11.1381.1 - 11.1381.26
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--933
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/933
- Download Count
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518
Paper Authors
Jennifer Turns University of Washington
Jennifer Turns is an assistant professor in the Department of Technical Communication at the University of Washington. She holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her interests include engineering education, learner-centered design, user-centered design, and audience analysis. Dr. Turns is currently working on multiple NSF grants dealing with engineering education including an NSF Career award exploring the impact of portfolio construction on engineering students’ professional identity. Email: jturns@u.washington.edu.
Angela Linse Temple University
Angela Linse is the director of the Teaching and Learning Center at Temple University. Dr. Linse holds B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in Anthropology, with an emphasis in American Southwest prehistory and geoarchaeology. Dr. Linse served as the Assistant Director for Faculty Development at the University of Washington's Center for Engineering Learning and Teaching. Her interests include graduate education and the role of individual consultations in the faculty development process. Dr. Linse is co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation grant investigating the teaching challenges of engineering faculty. Email: angela.linse@temple.edu.
Tammy VanDeGrift University of Portland
Tammy Vandegrift is an assistant professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Portland. She holds a PhD in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Washington. Along with her dissertation research in media delivery protocols, her interests include supporting the teaching and learning of software design and introductory programming. Email: vandegri@up.edu.
Matt Eliot University of Washington
Matt Eliot is a doctoral student in the Department of Technical Communication at the University of Washington. His interests include user-centered design, interaction design, ethnographic research, and accessible media. Email: mjeliot@u.washington.edu.
Jana Jones Microsoft Corp.
Jana Jones holds a Master of Science degree in Technical Communication from the University of Washington. She is currently using her technical communication skills on a job in the San Francisco Bay area. Her interests include all aspects of user-centered design and usability. Email: jbjones31@hotmail.com.
Steve Lappenbusch University of Washington
Steve Lappenbusch is a doctoral student in the Department of Technical Communication at the University of Washington. His interests include user-centered design, educational technology, and qualitative research methodologies. Email: lappy@u.washington.edu.
Abstract
NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract
Using Diversity Statements to Promote Engagement with Diversity and Teaching Abstract: For many engineering educators, the topic of diversity can be frustrating and difficult. Writing and sharing individual diversity statements represents one strategy for empowering educators in their efforts to address diversity in their teaching. In this paper, we present the results of an empirical study in which graduate students (future engineering educators) prepared diversity statements as part of a teaching portfolio program. We focused our analysis on the discussions associated with diversity statement program sessions and found the talk during these sessions to be characterized by a variety of teaching and diversity ideas, an interweaving of teaching and diversity ideas, and equitable contribution among participants. We believe these results suggest that the diversity statement exercise has promise while also illustrating that graduate students are capable of tackling this complex issue with some success.
I. Introduction
For many engineering educators, the topic of diversity can be frustrating and difficult. Even for those who acknowledge that diversity is an important and urgent issue for the engineering education community, translating understanding into tangible actions that support diverse students can be problematic. Some educators committed to diversity in engineering might be identified as “resistant” because they struggle to translate their support for diversity into explicit classroom practices.
In this paper, we present our research on one strategy for helping future engineering faculty address the topic of diversity in engineering education. Engineering graduate students develop a diversity statement as one task in the Engineering Teaching Portfolio Program1. The Engineering Teaching Portfolio Program (ETPP) provides a framework for engineering graduate students to create teaching portfolios consisting of a teaching statement, a diversity statement, and a number of annotated artifacts.
The results reported here focus on a subset of the data collected during the first implementation of this new program during the summer of 2003. The diversity statement exercise is only one of the topics explored by program participants in the eight-week program. Two research questions about the diversity statement exercise guided the analyses and results reported here: 1) does the diversity statement exercise show promise as a means of enabling participants to engage with diversity issues in engineering education?, and 2) how prepared are engineering graduate students to grapple with issues of diversity and teaching?
The remainder of this paper is organized into background, methods, results, discussion and conclusion sections. We provide background information about diversity in engineering education. Next, we provide a brief overview of our work including descriptions of the portfolio program and the diversity statement exercise and our goals for this paper. In the methods section we situate the study, describe the participants, the data sources and collection, and our analysis. Our results are divided into six parts. Four correspond to the major themes that emerged from our qualitative analysis and two provide perspective on the conversational sequence and
Turns, J., & Linse, A., & VanDeGrift, T., & Eliot, M., & Jones, J., & Lappenbusch, S. (2006, June), Using Diversity Statements To Promote Engagement With Diversity And Teaching Paper presented at 2006 Annual Conference & Exposition, Chicago, Illinois. 10.18260/1-2--933
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