Collaborative Research: Planning: Track 1 for Catalyzing a Paradigm Shift towards an Inclusive Engineering for Community Development

This planning grant will enable the development of a competitive and collaborative Centers for Equity in Engineering (CEE) Phase I project proposal. The Center proposal seeks to enable the research and practice of an Engineering for Community Development (ECD) that provides transformational experiences to all students, especially students of color. Through creating a distributed center across selected partner institutions, we are seeking to initiate and sustain a shift within ECD towards the principles of inclusive pedagogy.

Such a shift will eliminate the limitations of traditional ECD, which can often exclude groups of peoples, reinforce stereotypes, and leave partner communities wanting more. Replacement with an inclusive ECD can specifically provide for students of color, their assets, and their needs while positively impacting partner communities to strengthen efforts of broadening participation in engineering.

In conducting this research, we will understand the ways in which the limitations of service-learning’s ability to equitably educate all students can be overcome. More specifically, if service-learning is going to support the education of students from minoritized backgrounds, then we must research ECD with respect to the specific needs of students from these various backgrounds.

This work will impact students, community partners, and institutions of higher education through promoting ECD that is inclusive to all, where students from historically minoritized demographics will be supported through transformational experiences that encourage them to remain and succeed in engineering.

Through strengthening and creating a broad array of inclusive and culturally relevant ECD approaches, contexts, and data collection methods the research performed by the Center will enable effort across the research-to-practice cycle that systematically includes historically marginalized students and communities into ECDinitiatives. To accomplish this goal and maximize the chances of a funded proposal, the following primary objectives will be met within the planning proposal: Align core team through regular virtual meetings; Articulate core concept of research; Develop initial Delphi prompts; Plan and perform discovery phases of a Delphi method; Conduct an intensive two day workshop; And write and refine proposal using information from first two phases of Delphi.

This effort will produce new knowledge on what an inclusive ECD is and how it can be accomplished in practice. Through supporting inclusive and culturally relevant ECD practice, students from historically minoritized demographics will be supported to obtain transformational outcomes within ECD initiatives and by extension increase the likelihood to remain and succeed in engineering.

Ultimately, as promoted by the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the White House, federally funded research will, moving forward, try to include community knowledge and interest from its inception (generating research questions) to its conclusion (research deliverables) (National Academies, 2022). Hence, this inclusion of communities in research and design that ECD offers will challenge STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education at large to develop a student workforce capable of effectively interacting and co-developing with local communities and being diverse enough to empathize with the realities and challenges of racially, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse communities.

Through developing and exploring inclusive and culturally relevant ECD contexts, this planning grant, and in turn, the full grant, can enable the use of ECD problem domains and contexts that critically engage issues of marginalization and social justice to promote diverse and equitable ECD participation within engineering education. Collectively, these impacts will strengthen engineering institutions’ ability to serve as vehicles for broadening participation.

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.