CAREER: Using Equity Metrics and Reflective Engagement to Transform Engineering Classrooms Towards Racial Equity

Within efforts to broaden racially minoritized (e.g., Black, Latinx, indigenous) students’ participation in engineering, equity in undergraduate classrooms is a critically important part of student pathways. Although students frequently experience marginalization in the everyday engineering classroom, in general, engineering professors are not engaging as active change agents for racial equity in their own classroom. This CAREER project will research ways to shift classroom inequities across multiple institutional contexts and will incorporate lessons learned into broader education programs and resources. The project aligns with a Broadening Participation in Engineering program goal to transform engineering classroom culture to promote equity and inclusion, which will have substantial impact on the formation and professionalization of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous engineers. This project’s research plan will address key limitations in the field of engineering education research. Typical DEI research is disconnected from educational practice and does not examine processes to change everyday inequities. This project will model a novel form of broadening participation research which is embedded in classroom practice to gain fundamental understandings of the mechanisms that recreate everyday inequities. The education plan will incorporate findings from the research study into a theater-based intervention for faculty, to practice classroom engagement that notices, interprets, and acts in ways that improve equity in the local setting. Publications, research methods tools, and facilitation guides developed from the project will be shared on a website platform called the Equity Toolbox that can be used by faculty, faculty developers, and education researchers who focus on broadening participation in engineering. To build capacity to broaden the project’s positive societal impact, the PI will host a summer training for early career researchers who want to center equity and action in their research. Drawing on the theory of cultural production, the project will discern mechanisms for the reproduction of racial inequity in everyday engineering classrooms and will test ways to shift these settings towards equitable outcomes. The project will integrate critical ethnographic methodology and faculty engagement in an innovative empirical approach utilizing an equity metric as a focal point to engage faculty learning. The research team will collaborate with faculty instructors to define an equity metric that relates to a dimension of the classroom practice and share feedback with the faculty, creating a feedback loop for the faculty to improve the classroom practice over time. Equity metrics will include three major prototypes: participation in classroom discourse, level of background knowledge required in lecture, and team or partner roles and participation. The faculty engagement facilitation approach will emphasize positionality, reflective dialogue, and an iterative design research approach to classroom practice. The research team will embed one semester in each of 4 university contexts that have contrasting demographic and institutional characteristics (including Hispanic Serving, Predominantly White, Historically Black, public, private, doctoral university, and community college). In a cross-institutional analysis combining data from classroom observations and faculty engagement sessions, the research team will study 1) faculty learning trajectories on racial equity, 2) strategies and practices that improve classroom racial equity, and 3) similarities and differences across institutional and demographic contexts. This project will catalyze efforts to combine the nuanced insights of qualitative research, the communicative importance of quantitative metrics, direct engagement with faculty, and built capacity with education researchers to lead the way towards a sea change for equity in engineering classrooms. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.