While changing engineering departments to become more inclusive and equitable is a common goal, research repeatedly confirms that such change is rare. Notably, change efforts commonly fail in higher education institutions (Kezar 2011), and this failure is typically attributed to faculty resistance, ineffective leadership, competing values, and conservative traditions (Klempin and Karp 2018). Recent nationwide National Science Foundation-funded efforts to revolutionize engineering departments provide insight into the salience of power dynamics as drivers of or barriers to equitable, lasting change. We interviewed members of these change teams to understand the challenges they encountered and how they navigated these. Using an intersectionality framework (Collins & Bilge, 2016) we explored four lenses on power relations: (1) from a structural lens, we see that policies may affect individuals differently based on their social and role identities; (2) from a cultural lens, ideas and culture organize power, often blinding those with privilege from noticing bias; (3) from a disciplinary lens, people train and coerce each other to behave in certain ways and to sustain norms; and (4) from an interpersonal lens, we see that an individual’s social (e.g., gender, ethnicity) and role (career, position, voluntary memberships) identities can shape how they experience bias. Using these lenses, we characterized ways members positioned themselves in relation to change efforts and the degree to which they held substantive power or were endangered through their participation. In many cases, disciplinary norms revealed clashes between the original structures and cultures, and the sought-after changed structures, cultures, and disciplinary practices. For some, such clashes revealed a veneer of change progress; for others, clashes served as inflection points. We share strategies for deliberately engaging power relations in change projects.
http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-4610-8052
University of New Mexico
[biography]
Susannah C. Davis is a research assistant professor at the University of New Mexico. She holds a Ph.D. and M.Ed. from the University of Washington and a B.A. from Smith College. Her research explores how postsecondary institutions, their faculty, and thei
Nadia Kellam (she/they) is Associate Professor of Engineering and the Associate Director for Research Excellence within The Polytechnic School of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. She is a faculty in the Engineering Education Systems and Design PhD program. Dr. Kellam is an engineering education researcher and a mechanical engineer. She is also deputy editor of the Journal of Engineering Education and co-chair of ASEE’s Committee on Scholarly Publications. In her research, she is broadly interested in developing critical understandings of the culture of engineering education and, especially, the experiences of marginalized undergraduate engineering students and engineering educators.
Dr. Vanessa Svihla is a learning scientist and professor at the University of New Mexico in the Organization, Information and Learning Sciences program and in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department.
Bala Vignesh Sundaram is a PhD student in Engineering Education Systems and Design department in Arizona State University. His research interest is in exploring the potential benefits of teacher empathy in engineering classrooms.
Jemal Halkiyo is a PhD student in Engineering Education Systems and Design at Arizona State University. Mr. Halkiyo Bachelor of Science from Hawassa University, and Masters of Science in Civil Engineering from Arba Minch University, both in Ethiopia. Mr. Halkiyo uses mixed methods to study his primary research interest: broadening the participation of Engineering Education in Ethiopian universities to increase the diversity, inclusivity, equity and quality of Engineering Education. He studies how different student-groups such as women and men, rich and poor, student from rural and urban, technologically literate and less literate can have quality and equitable learning experiences to not only thrive in their performances.
In doing so, he focuses on Engineering education policies and practices in teaching learning processes, assessments, laboratories and practical internships. Mr. Halkiyo has been teaching different Civil Engineering courses at Bule Hora University, Ethiopia, where he also served as a department head, and conducts various research and community projects.
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