BPE Track 3 Inclusive Mentoring Hub: Raices Institute for Transformative Advocacy (RITA)

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

This NSF-BPE Track 3: Inclusive Mentoring Hub project, called Raíces Institute for Transformative Advocacy (RITA) will equip engineering contingent faculty (adjuncts, part-timers, and non-tenure track), who are Black, Indigenous, People of Color of all intersecting identities (BIPOCx), to form their own transformative grassroots advocacy strategies for attaining equity in promotion pathways and working conditions at their hiring academic institutions. Project objectives center around: developing authentic mentor/mentee relationships, learning/developing transformative individual/collective advocacy plans, and raising awareness for the promotion and/or working conditions of BIPOCx contingent faculty in engineering.

Due to the scant attention paid to contingent faculty, this population is severely understudied and undersupported. In the United States alone, there are ~1.5 million faculty employed in higher education out of which over 46% are contingent, the majority composed of marginalized groups, creating a missed opportunity to broaden participation. To broaden participation, our nation needs to leverage a diverse and inclusive science and engineering enterprise to secure economic, national security, and jobs of the future.

This project attends to all aspects of this national need. Contingent faculty typically serve fundamental undergraduate courses and large class sizes, indirectly impacting the educational experience of students. Yet, continual stresses of an unstable and non-permanent contingent workforce with limited professional development, promotion opportunities, and benefits, negatively affects higher education.

Literature suggests that contingent faculty struggle with implementing evidence-based teaching and mentoring to students because they are either juggling multiple courses in multiple institutions to ‘make ends meet’ or handle multiple service responsibilities with little-to-no support to assist students fully. RITA serves as one of the early studies into the realities and circumstances of contingent faculty in engineering with the aim to generate knowledge, provide recommendations and strategies for institutional action to support, and provide equitable working conditions for these faculty.

This project will, by extension benefit numerous undergraduate engineering students who are enrolled in many of these contingent faculty-led courses.

RITA will develop a grassroots-initiated, knowledge-generating, inclusive mentoring hub where first-hand, experiential information acquired from the BIPOCx contingent faculty in engineering will be strategically shared with key decision-makers at their institutions. While not all paths lead to promotion, we argue that all contingent faculty need better working conditions.

This project is a partnership between the University of Florida (a Hispanic-Emerging Institution), Virginia Tech (a Predominantly White Institution), and Morehouse College (a Historically Black College and University). These institutions will create a series of professional development and mentoring opportunities to assist two cohorts of contingent engineering faculty (Phase 1- 12 faculty and Phase 2- 12 faculty) to create individual and collective advocacy plans alongside a repertoire of mentors, evaluators, and professional development experts.

Through an implementation research methodology called participatory action research (PAR), RITA’s key research question to be answered is: How can BIPOCx contingent faculty in engineering be mentored, at the grassroots, towards transformative advocacy plans for attaining promotion and/or equitable working conditions? PAR will require a series of collaborative planning, acting, and reflection activities between the BIPOCx contingent faculty and their mentors to design and enact advocacy plans in a safe space and environment.

Journals, logbooks, and other reflective materials will be collected and analyzed using phenomenographically-inspired approaches. The coded and de-identified information will yield multiple practices, recommendations, and strategies that will be assembled into an Online Repository and shared via podcasts for widespread dissemination. This work will significantly: (1) inform the understudied scholarship on how to support these contingent faculty in engineering; and (2) lay the foundation for an action agenda that alters the trajectory of these faculty by raising awareness for the promotion and/or working conditions of BIPOCx contingent faculty in engineering.

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.