2023 Collaborative Network for Computing and Engineering Diversity (CoNECD)

This study will leverage racialized organization theory (ROT) to establish the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels involved with maintaining synergy in serving and addressing the needs of communities (Ray, 2019). ROT explores how each level comprehensively facilitates negative academic experiences and projects demeaning racial ideologies. In the context of engineering and computing education, these communities include racial groups that have long been excluded by the disciplines. Higher education institutions have made strides to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion within their programs and colleges. Yet, it is important to assess the structures within institutions to understand their alignment with community impact truly. By using a top-down approach (focusing first on the state-level issues and moving down to the engineering and computing departments’ research decisions), researchers hope to understand how education systems serve the community they are geographically located in. The authors will review how three top-ranked Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), Historically Black College and University (HBCU), and Predominantly White Institution (PWI) engineering and computing colleges in Virginia synergize their research initiatives with the regional needs of the racial and ethnic groups they primarily serve. Through multi-source document analysis, the researchers will locate diversity, equity, and inclusion concerns for the three dominant racial groups in the state of Virginia [marco-]. Then, consideration will be given to how the selected institutions serve these populations [meso-] through their engineering/computing departments [micro-]. To understand the extent to which the dominant communities in Virginia are served, the theoretical framework of servingness will be used. Although intended to analyze how HSIs serve their Latinx community, this framework will provide a multidimensional and conceptual way to understand what it means to actually serve a diverse community through the framing of: (1) strategic outcomes, (2) internal organizational dimensions, and (3) external influences. While ROT will be leveraged to explain, the servingness theoretical framework will be used as an interpretive lens. As two theories that leverage racial dynamics, we use ROT to break down the racial structure of a university and servingness to analyze the extent to which it serves its surrounding community.

With DEI issues being at the forefront of engineering/computing fields, our research question is:
How do engineering/computing colleges and departments conduct research in support of the institution's primary racial and ethnic groups as represented in the surrounding community?