Collaborative Research: Research: Intersections between Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and Ethics in Engineering

Efforts focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and ethics are often siloed in engineering. While generally pursued as separate lines of investigation, we hypothesize that the aims, objectives, and goals pertaining to ethics and DEI often overlap. By investigating this potential overlap, we hypothesize that we can help improve overall efforts at promoting DEI and ethics in engineering.

Our primary research objective is to synthesize intersections between ethics and DEI among engineering academic and workforce communities. In this study, we begin with a systematic literature review that explores potential overlap in literature in ethics and DEI. Second, we will study how engineering academics view (consciously and subconsciously) ethics and DEI as related.

Finally, we will study how industrial practitioners view (consciously and subconsciously) the potential overlap between ethics and DEI. Collectively, this study will enable us to compare how literature, academics, and practitioners view ethics and DEI as related. We will use findings to generate curricular and workforce training efforts to better integrate ethics and DEI in engineering.

This study will benefit society by promoting the formation of engineers who can engage with different values and perspectives in ethical ways.

Despite various models, initiatives, and pockets of innovation by scholars and programs, we have not realized widespread changes in the diversification of the engineering workforce. We theorize that one barrier to change is the disjuncture between lines of scholarship from engineering education researchers in the intersecting spaces of DEI and engineering ethics.

This study seeks to find ways for these communities to support one another by making explicit hidden structural issues that mask the intersections between ethics and DEI in the context of engineering. This study is comprised of three phases, addressing the following respective research questions: (1) How are engineering ethics and DEI related based on theoretical and empirical understandings of affective and cognitive development of students and practitioners within these communities?; (2) How are engineering ethics and DEI related based on mental models elicited from academics active in these two areas of research and scholarship?; and (3) How are engineering ethics and DEI related based on mental models elicited from a diverse cross-section of industrial practitioners?

To address RQ1, we will use systematic literature review procedures to synthesize peer-reviewed scholarship on approaches to, and outcomes of, interventions centered around ethics and DEI. To address RQ2 and RQ3, academics (Phase 2) and industrial practitioners (Phase 3) will respond to an ethics/DEI challenge in multiple formats, including graphically, textually, and verbally.

We will critically analyze the literature and mental models via a discourse analysis approach, guided by seven building tasks identified by Gee (significance, practices, identities, relationships, politics, connections, and sign systems). We will triangulate Phase 1, 2, and 3 findings to identify how discourses vary across the academic and industrial contexts.

This triangulation will enable us to generate actionable modalities for supporting educational efforts aimed at the intersection of ethics and DEI both in curricular and workforce contexts. We will adopt an activist-oriented approach to disseminate findings to the research community and professional organizations through multiple mechanisms. This will directly benefit society by facilitating the professional formation of engineers who are more ethically adept and capable of engaging with difference.

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.