Exploring How the Exercise of Power Contributes to Creating More Inclusive Spaces in Engineering Education

Abstract

Engineering Education in the United States has been trying to address its problem with underrepresentation of minoritized student groups for decades. In recent years, the engineering community has shifted its focus from solely diversity efforts to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts that focus on structural barriers to representation. The work of this dissertation looks to examine efforts to create more inclusive spaces, starting with exploring the educators' perspective followed by collaborative research methods including both faculty and student perspectives. The aim of these co-design efforts is to explore the space of power as it contributes to exclusion. Through co-design workshops, students and faculty discuss experiences of exclusion, reflect on their privileged and marginalized identities, and finally discuss opportunities to create change. Findings from this work re-iterate that doing work to create inclusive spaces is hard, both for students and faculty. Doing this work has both individual components, such as learning about the history and culture of engineering and reflecting on one’s identities, and also community-centered work as people learn from each other’s experiences, acknowledging that intersectionality creates a multitude of ways one moment in time can be experienced based on the different identities one holds. Using Patricia Hill Collins’ Domains of Power, this work dissects how different moments of inclusion are made up of interpersonal, structural, cultural, and disciplinary domains of power. This dissertation concludes by offering two steps the engineering education community can continue to take as we work to-wards creating inclusive spaces. The first is to accept and appreciate the hard work of doing this work. Hard means it is a slow process. It means one must take time to learn and process the learn-ing. Hard means having to reflect on the learning and how one’s identities privilege us at times and marginalize us at other times, based on the context and who is in the room. But hard also means taking action to “move the needle” forward. Second, one should not do all of it alone. Have conversations with others. Use conversations to process what one is learning. To seek advice. To learn from others’ experiences. And to apologize when one has made a mistake. Engineering has a long history, and with that history comes many entrenched norms that are not always beneficial. But as a discipline, engineering prides itself in solving problems and impacting the world for the better. Let’s move forward focusing on our aspirations to make the world a better place for everyone.