BPE Track 3: Kindred Harbor Collective: Harvesting Black Consciousness in Engineering Education

Broadening participation in engineering education necessitates broadening the ways we theorize about knowledge and establish understanding. For engineering to reflect the diverse and true intellectual capacity of the nation’s population, the field must make space for interdisciplinary, critical, culturally relevant, and socially just research. Mentorship has been found to be transformative contributing to the greater equity, access, and inclusion in engineering, enabling students to see themselves as researchers as they find their place in the field while supporting the realization of their next stage in professional development.

This Broadening Participation in Engineering Track 3 inclusive mentoring hub will create a community of scholars equipped with education and tools to mitigate racialized oppression in engineering education environments. We will address this purpose through a five-phase participatory action research design that is focused on building Black scholars in engineering education through the application of Black intellectualism as scholarship and solidarity anchored in an Afrocentric value system.

Black undergraduate, graduate, postdocs, and early career faculty will cultivate a critical community focused on the development of new approaches, new ideas, and new solutions to racism in engineering education. Three institutions spanning diverse institutional profiles, one Historically White College/University, one Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), and one Historically Black College/University (HBCU), will enable us to simultaneously consider how the mentorship is received as well as how it varies across institutional context.

Our proposed program is evidence-based, multigenerational, identity-affirming, fosters career-stage appropriate independence, and encourages self-reflection with embedded mechanisms for mentor accountability. The most fundamental aspect of our approach to broadening participation will be revolutionizing engineering education research through foregrounding Black systems of understanding in the construction of knowledge. Through mentorship, we will expand our individual knowledge and that of our scholarly community.

Through our varied institutional homes, we will come together to be a continuous and long-establishing positive professional and psychosocial support system where students gain real time guidance and care while also learning to be empowered in Blackness in scholarship and identity. Much scholarship to date has focused on supposed deficits of Black students and faculty, and their persistence.

Black students and faculty need tools to dismantle the intersectional structures and systems of oppression that undergird engineering education. Black intellectualism centers the social organization of the Black community as a unit of analysis for deconstructing mechanisms of racism, offering both critiques and correctives. This frame of reference enhances understanding of Black/Afrocentric norms and values while simultaneously enabling a more dignified and democratic approach to inquiry within a discipline inhibited by ideals of White supremacy. This work is guided by the following research questions:

RQ1. What is the impact of utilizing Black Consciousness as an epistemological lens in engineering education scholarship?

RQ2. What aspects of mentoring (career support, psychosocial support, and/or identity sharing mentoring) are related to Black academics' development of research-related skills, academic and professional development, and level of independence in research?

RQ3. How effective are arts-based educational activities, specifically podcasts, as modes for cultivating a community of scholars?

Through this mentorship hub we will, through the pollination resulting from mentees as change agents, significantly influence the culture of mentorship in engineering education. We will create a supportive network for Black engineering academics across a range of levels, and longitudinally. We anticipate increased engagement of scholars rooted in Black intellectualism in the academic community, shaping talent to advance this nascent research agenda in engineering education research.

In sharing our findings with centers for research on teaching and learning, this work stands to impact the way faculty development is designed for Black academics, and specifically, for those interested in Afrocentric engineering research.

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.