2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 397: Sustainable Racial Equity: Creating a New Generation of Engineering Education DEI Leaders

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

The purpose of this project is to advance our understanding of the experiences, educational training, and research that supports the development of effective engineering education leaders assuming roles focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). These roles include but are not limited to DEI University committee service, National Organizations focused on racial equity and the improvement of conditions for traditionally marginalized populations, DEI administrative roles in higher education, DEI advisory roles in funded projects, or DEI consulting work. In the context of this work, we conceptualize racial equity in engineering as a collection of outcomes, processes, and interpersonal treatments that are neither determined nor predicted by race or racial bias, that are sustainable and have a long-term impact.

Despite efforts in the field to broaden participation and make engineering more equitable and inclusive, we still fall short of attracting and retaining students and faculty members from traditionally marginalized populations, especially at the large engineering Institutions (which drive overall numbers). Part of the problem is that DEI initiatives, programs, and research is not supported by strong institutional commitment and policies.

In this paper, we report our updates on phase 1 of the project, which includes the conduction of a review of the literature to understand how DEI has been theorized in engineering education, and based on those theories, we describe the development of an interview protocol to understand the experiences, knowledge, and decision-making processes of DEI leaders. Similarly, we report on the development of criteria to be able to select our interview participants.

Authors

Dr. Homero Murzi http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-3849-2947 Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University [biography]

Dr. Homero Murzi (he/él/his) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech with honorary appointments at the University of Queensland (Australia) and the University of Los Andes (Venezuela). Homero is the leader of the Engineering Competencies, Learning, and Inclusive Practices for Success (ECLIPS) Lab, where he leads a team focused on doing research on contemporary, culturally relevant, and inclusive pedagogical practices, emotions in engineering, competency development, and understanding the experiences of traditionally marginalized engineering students (e.g., Latinx, international students, Indigenous students) from an asset-based perspective. Homero’s goal is to develop engineering education practices that value the capital that traditionally marginalized students bring into the field and to train graduate students and faculty members with the tools to promote effective and inclusive learning environments and mentorship practices. Homero aspires to change discourses around broadening participation in engineering and promoting action to change. Homero has been recognized as a Diggs Teaching Scholar, a Graduate Academy for Teaching Excellence Fellow, a Global Perspectives Fellow, a Diversity Scholar, a Fulbright Scholar, a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, and was inducted into the Bouchet Honor Society. Homero serves as the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Chair for the Commission on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (CDEI), the Program Chair for the ASEE Faculty Development Division, and the Vice Chair for the Research in Engineering Education Network (REEN). He holds degrees in Industrial Engineering (BS, MS) from the National Experimental University of Táchira, Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Temple University, and Engineering Education (PhD) from Virginia Tech.
Miss Yi Cao Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University [biography]

CAO Yi is a third-year Ph.D. Candidate at Virginia Tech's Department of Engineering Education, under the guidance of Dr. Jennifer Case and Dr. Qin Zhu. She is interested in integrating the arts and engineering to foster compassion, diversity, justice, democracy, and peace in a global context. Her research interest broadly covers international comparative research on innovation, teaching, and learning in engineering education.
Her primary research methodology is qualitative, drawing heavily on interviews, focus groups, and narrative techniques. She is also adept in mixed-method approaches and quantitative methods, including NLP progress and data clustering.
Natali Huggins Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University [biography]

Huggins is a Research Scientist in the Engineering Education Department at Virginia Tech. She holds a master's in public administration from the National Experimental University of Táchira in Venezuela. In addition, she has several years of experience in research and practice at graduate education level in the engineering field, with special focus on assess based perspectives, minoritized students’ socialization, and agency in graduate education. Her strengths include qualitative research study design and implementation. Her dissertation examined Latinx motivation to pursue Ph.D. in engineering, minoritized engineering doctoral students’ socialization and the impact of the engineering context in their experiences. Her research expertise lies in diversity and inclusion in graduate education, with a particular interest in minoritized students' socialization, the engineering context, and the best ways to support students' persistence to degree completion.
Andres Nieto Leal http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7996-7115 Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

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