Work in Progress: Exploring an Engineering Faculty’s Intention Toward Inclusive Teaching

Memoria Matters; Carla B. Zoltowski; Patrice Marie Buzzanell; Andrew O. Brightman

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Conference: 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access
Location: Virtual On line
Publication Date: June 22, 2020
Start Date: June 22, 2020
End Date: June 26, 2021
Conference Session: Care and Inclusive Teaching
Tagged Division: Educational Research and Methods
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Page Count: 9
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--35634
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/35634
Download Count: 347

Paper Authors

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Memoria Matters Purdue University at West Lafayette

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Memoria Matters is a PhD student in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. She is also pursuing a Master's degree at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering for computer engineering, in which she obtained her BSE from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interest is in increasing the diversity of engineering by improving the inclusivity of engineering higher education through teaching methods, policies, and culture change.

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Carla B. Zoltowski Purdue University at West Lafayette

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Carla B. Zoltowski is an assistant professor of engineering practice in the Schools of Electrical and Computer Engineering and (by courtesy) Engineering Education, and Director of the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program within the College of Engineering at Purdue. She holds a B.S.E.E., M.S.E.E., and Ph.D. in Engineering Education, all from Purdue. Her research interests include the professional formation of engineers, diversity, inclusion, and equity in engineering, human-centered design, engineering ethics, and leadership.

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Patrice Marie Buzzanell Purdue University at West Lafayette orcid.org/0000-0003-0058-7676

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Patrice M. Buzzanell is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida and Endowed Visiting Professor for the School of Media and Design at Shanghai Jiaotong University. Fellow and Past President of the International Communication Association (ICA), she served as President of the Council of Communication Associations and the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender. She is a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. Her research focuses on career, work-life policy, resilience, gender, and engineering design. She received ICA’s Mentorship Award and the Provost Outstanding Mentor Award at Purdue, where she was University Distinguished Professor and Endowed Chair and Director of the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence. She has worked with Purdue-ADVANCE initiatives for institutional change, four EPICS teams including Transforming Lives Building Global Communities (TLBGC) in Ghana, and individual engineering ethical development and team ethical climate scales as well as everyday negotiations of ethics in design and professional formation of engineers through NSF funding. [Email: pmbuzzanell@usf.edu; buzzanel@purdue.edu]

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Andrew O. Brightman Purdue University at West Lafayette

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Andrew O. Brightman serves as Assistant Head for Academic Affairs and Associate Professor of Engineering Practice in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. His research background is in cellular biochemistry, tissue engineering, and engineering ethi

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Abstract

In this Work in Progress paper, we present preliminary work exploring the intentions around diversity and inclusion of electrical and computer engineering faculty members in response to initiatives in the department related to inclusive teaching.

Due to the strong relationship between positive faculty-student interactions and student persistence, as well as the faculty’s role in shaping department climate, faculty development efforts around diversity and inclusion have huge potential for effectively transforming the inclusivity of engineering education. However, many engineering professors still do not see the relevance of diversity and inclusion to their jobs. As part of a larger study addressing diversity and inclusion in engineering through a design thinking approach, interviews were conducted with the faculty of an electrical and computer engineering (ECE) department at a large, research intensive university, which were aimed at assessing faculty perceptions of department culture, diversity and inclusion. Through thematic analysis of 11 such interviews, we found a lack of motivation among the faculty to take action to improve diversity and inclusion at their school. We framed our analysis with Fishbein and Ajzen’s “reasoned action model” for human behavior, which lists three factors necessary to develop an “intention” to take action--attitude, perceived norm, and perceived behavioral control--and found that these professors showed a lack of the latter two factors. They often believed that diversity and inclusion were neither inherent parts of their jobs, nor issues over which they personally had any control.

These observations inspired the creation of a “tip sheet”, as a tool for encouraging inclusive teaching in ECE, which was distributed to the faculty. This document included a collection of inclusive teaching ideas based on the research literature, along with messaging to address the two missing factors for intention by emphasizing the faculty’s impact on diversity and inclusion and how these issues fit into their everyday work.

Initial reactions to the tip sheet have inspired us to further investigate faculty intention around diversity and inclusion in the next phase of our research. Whereas the original interviews were broadly about department culture, the second phase of faculty interviews focus on the problems we identified by using the reasoned action model as a framework, and the tip sheet as an example intervention. Through interviews, we explore the faculty’s reactions to the tip sheet, specifically investigating its effects on the three factors for intention and the background factors from which they emerge, as defined in the literature on the reasoned action model. Interviews will be analyzed using a theoretical thematic analysis approach (Braun and Clarke, 2006). In this way, we can discover how an engineering faculty’s intention around diversity and inclusion manifests, functions, and changes, in order to develop more effective interventions in the future. In this Work in Progress paper, we present a summary of the previous findings, the study design and methods, and preliminary insights from the pilot interview.

Citation
Format

Matters, M., & Zoltowski, C. B., & Buzzanell, P. M., & Brightman, A. O. (2020, June), Work in Progress: Exploring an Engineering Faculty’s Intention Toward Inclusive Teaching Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--35634

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - In this Work in Progress paper, we present preliminary work exploring the intentions around diversity and inclusion of electrical and computer engineering faculty members in response to initiatives in the department related to inclusive teaching.

Due to the strong relationship between positive faculty-student interactions and student persistence, as well as the faculty’s role in shaping department climate, faculty development efforts around diversity and inclusion have huge potential for effectively transforming the inclusivity of engineering education. However, many engineering professors still do not see the relevance of diversity and inclusion to their jobs. As part of a larger study addressing diversity and inclusion in engineering through a design  thinking approach, interviews were conducted with the faculty of an electrical and computer engineering (ECE) department at a large, research intensive university, which were aimed at assessing faculty perceptions of department culture, diversity and inclusion. Through thematic analysis of 11 such interviews, we found a lack of motivation among the faculty to take action to improve diversity and inclusion at their school. We framed our analysis with Fishbein and Ajzen’s “reasoned action model” for human behavior, which lists three factors necessary to develop an “intention” to take action--attitude, perceived norm, and perceived behavioral control--and found that these professors showed a lack of the latter two factors. They often believed that diversity and inclusion were neither inherent parts of their jobs, nor issues over which they personally had any control.

These observations inspired the creation of a “tip sheet”, as a tool for encouraging inclusive teaching in ECE, which was distributed to the faculty. This document included a collection of inclusive teaching ideas based on the research literature, along with messaging to address the two missing factors for intention by emphasizing the faculty’s impact on diversity and inclusion and how these issues fit into their everyday work.

Initial reactions to the tip sheet have inspired us to further investigate faculty intention around diversity and inclusion in the next phase of our research. Whereas the original interviews were broadly about department culture, the second phase of faculty interviews focus on the problems we identified by using the reasoned action model as a framework, and the tip sheet as an example intervention. Through interviews, we explore the faculty’s reactions to the tip sheet, specifically investigating its effects on the three factors for intention and the background factors from which they emerge, as defined in the literature on the reasoned action model. Interviews will be analyzed using a theoretical thematic analysis approach (Braun and Clarke, 2006). In this way, we can discover how an engineering faculty’s intention around diversity and inclusion manifests, functions, and changes, in order to develop more effective interventions in the future. In this Work in Progress paper, we present a summary of the previous findings, the study design and methods, and preliminary insights from the pilot interview.
AU  - Memoria Matters
AU  - Carla B. Zoltowski
AU  - Patrice Marie Buzzanell
AU  - Andrew O. Brightman
CY  - Virtual On line 
DA  - 2020/06/22
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Work in Progress: Exploring an Engineering Faculty’s Intention Toward Inclusive Teaching
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/35634
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--35634
ER  -