Promoting Privilege

Point of view: I am a cisgender, White male in my sixties. I retired recently after working with children in a professional capacity since the mid-1970s. My first career involved organizing and managing youth sports programs for public recreation departments. I began my second career as an elementary school teacher in the privileged white neighborhood where I grew up near Atlanta, Georgia. There were no African American students at any of the public schools I attended. By the time I took a position in the central office after teaching for 14 years, Black students comprised 77% of the county’s 98,000 students (Anderson & Smith-Hunt, 2005). I spent my last six years in the classroom teaching fifth graders and serving as the school’s gifted liaison teacher. In the latter role, I administered tests to students to determine if they were eligible for the “gifted” label. At that time, I also taught an assessment course to teachers who were seeking a gifted add-on endorsement to their teaching certificates. I recently retired from a large school district in a different state after working as an educational measurement and assessment specialist for 12 years. Value: Numerous educational policies and procedures in the United States benefit children from privileged families over their traditionally underserved counterparts, which include students of color and low-income students. This piece describes a public school district’s inequitable practices related to its program for gifted students, practices that are not uncommon in many American school districts. “Education is one of the best ways to address systemic inequities, but education systems in the US seem to be increasingly subject to criticism that they are unable to change and promote equity” (Cheville, 2018, p. 1). Despite their inherent resistance to change, educational agencies must be made aware of discriminatory policies and procedures. Stakeholders must then hold policy makers and educational leaders to account. As James hanged until it is faced” (1962, p. 38). Summary: Gifted education programs in public schools comprise mainly middle-class and upper-middle-class students of European and Asian descent. Students from low socioeconomic groups, African American students, Latinx students, and Indigenous American students continue to be underrepresented in gifted programs, despite the fact that this inequity was brought to light many years ago (Ford, 1998). Given our nation’s long history of overt and covert racism, it is not surprising that the manner by which students are identified for gifted services is systemically entrenched and at the heart of the problem. Most states have mandates or provide guidance to local school districts regarding identification criteria; however, very few of the measurement instruments and methods used to evaluate of children for gifted services are effective at facilitating equal representation of all groups in gifted education programs. This piece examines one school district’s guidelines used to identify students for gifted services, including admittance to its prestigious school for gifted children. Because the guidelines are typical of practices employed by many other school districts, the information contained herein is generalizable to a larger audience.

Reflexive Rejection: Confessions of our first encounters with SenseMaker®, an emerging research methodology for STEM education

Point of view (25-50 words): We are four female educational practitioners who engage in varying degrees and forms of teaching, research, and evaluation. And, we have been educated in legacy research methods. We are curious about new approaches to conceptualizing, inquiring into, and doing science, technology, engineering and math (‘STEM’) education that have the potential to disrupt systemic social, economic, and ecological abuse and exploitation. Value of submission (25-50 words): This autoethnographic analysis of our individual narratives serves as a cautionary tale and emotional sign-posts for those seeking to explore emerging research methodologies, particularly those that are suited for complex, dynamic social systems, such as “engineering education”: expect cognitive and/or emotional dissonance. By definition, alternative approaches to research will occur as new and possibly foreign to those trained in traditional research approaches. Such a reflexive rejection happens unconsciously and undermines the goal of learning--discovery. Abstract It is becoming increasingly common to hear engineering education described as a complex system (National Science Foundation, 2018). Such a perspective shifts the focus of analysis from the parts to the whole – from individual elements to the relationships between the elements. Most engineering education researchers, however, are trained in atomistic or reductionist models of inquiry (Borrego, 2007; Laszlo, 1996; Robbins, 2007), which begs the question – how prepared are engineering education researchers to conduct research on, and productively intervene in, complex systems? As four educational practitioners who have previously embraced complex systems thinking, both in our teaching and in our research, we considered ourselves well prepared to explore a new, participatory research methodology, called SenseMaker, which is explicitly designed to understand characterize and facilitate interventions in complex systems. And yet, all four of us independently and reflexively rejected this methodology upon our first encounter with it. In this study, we used collaborative autoethnographic techniques to examine what it is about our shared cultures, experiences, and training as engineering education researchers and practitioners that led us to react in this way. We reflect on how methodologies founded on complex systems theory, like SenseMaker, often sit outside the boundaries of what we are used to and may initially occur to us as “foreign,” or even “wrong.” Further, we explore how our reflexive responses were connected to embodied cognition, that is, a recognition that “[one’s] body, beyond the brain “play[s] a significant causal… role in cognitive processing” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011). We offer some suggestions for developing an awareness of both reflexive rejection responses and how to recognize and use our embodied cognition. These perspectives are important for researchers who seek new ways to understand and work with complex, dynamic social systems.

Fostering Civic Engagement across the Curriculum

Now that media coverage has waned, it is the time for reflecting on last year’s highs and lows as we make improvements for the future. Extensively covered in the media, the midterm election cycle was a 2018 event for the history books. These developments still present a unique opportunity for teaching civic engagement to students. We professors may have been energetic and eager about discussing the issues in our classrooms. On the contrary, some of our students might have lacked the same enthusiasm. Others may have expressed outright anxiety regarding the political process. What can we do to help with such issues in the future?

Broadening the Engineering Canon

Within engineering, Western, White, colonial knowledge has historically been privileged over other ways of knowing. Few engineering educators recognize the impact of ethnocentricity and masculinity of the engineering curriculum on our students. In this paper we argue for a new approach, one which seeks to create an engineering curriculum that recognizes the great diversity of cultural practices that exist in the world. We begin by reviewing key ideas from three pedagogies not typically incorporated in engineering education: Culturally Relevant/Responsive Pedagogy, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy, and Indigenous Pedagogy. We then present our attempts to develop an engineering curricula informed by these practices. We describe interventions we have tried at two levels: modules within traditional engineering sciences and entirely new courses. We aim to convince readers that these pedagogies may be a key tool in changing the dominant discourse of engineering education, improving the experience for those students already here, and making it more welcoming to those who are not.

Murmurations

Point of view: I am a cisgender white male in my mid-fifties. I have spent most of my life in higher education in engineering departments. My experiences have included undergraduate and graduate education at a private, research-intensive institution, postdoc and faculty at a land-grant institution, serving for several years as a program officer at the National Science Foundation (NSF), and most recently as chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at a private, liberal arts, predominantly undergraduate institution. This article draws on all these experiences, but particularly from my time serving at NSF and in the years since. I am also one of the founders of Murmurations: Equity, Emergence, and Education and represent my own perspective on what I hope this experimental journal can contribute to the larger education ecosystem. Value: This article outlines my rationale in partnering with others to start a dialogue journal. I believe education is one of the best ways to address systemic inequities, but education systems in the US seem to be increasingly subject to criticism that they are unable to change and promote equity. This article hypothesizes that resistance to change is structurally built into the system through the mental models held by the system’s participants. These models can be broadly classified as oriented towards identifying problems rather than proposing solutions. While such approaches work in simple systems, they often backfire in complex systems that have multiple and often competing impacts. For meaningful change to occur we ourselves must seek to expand our perspectives and change our mental model of education to one of a complex ecosystem. Changing mental models is hypothesized to occur by engaging in meaningful dialogues with others who have experiences different than our own. By providing a forum for these conversations my hope is that Murmurations will serve as a vehicle to share perspectives from different niches within the larger ecosystem, which in turn can shift mental models. Since Murmurations is an experiment, an additional intent is to encourage voices from across the education ecosystem to make contributions.

They Will Ask You

Point of view: I am an African-American female engineer in the white-male dominated field of Engineering. Value: Insight into invisible experiences and a tool for discussion and unpacking subtleties of systematic disparities and injustices.

What is engineering?

Point of view: I'm a contagiously enthusiastic hacker, scholar, and teacher with an industry background in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities. As a teenager at the Illinois Math and Science Academy, I loved storytelling and cinematography and wanted to major in the arts. That wasn't an option for my family of immigrants, so I took up electrical and computer engineering at Olin College (BS), where I arrived thinking that a breadboard was for baking (it's for electronics). I am Deaf and have always been a strong visual thinker; this piece was written and drawn during my first semester as a PhD student in engineering education at Purdue University. I’m intrigued by how multiple interacting curricular cultures in higher education can deconstruct our notions of engineering, education, and just about everything else. Value: This work is a playful contribution to engineering education ontologies (as a subset of philosophy), which explores questions of reality and being - what "is." It challenges the high consensus culture of engineering, especially the tendency to seek clearly defined and fixed meanings for terms. In this case, the notion of "engineering" itself is called into question. It also explores what graphical/non-textual scholarship in and about higher education might look like. Summary: This graphic essay was made when I was a first-semester engineering education graduate student. This past self was naive regarding "scholarly" and "academic" writing conventions, and frustrated both by the limitations of text as a standalone medium and the engineering disciplinary tendency to seek clearly defined and fixed meanings for terms rather than exploring their possibilities. I am now a slightly more seasoned scholar seven years down the line with a desire to engage in discussion and revision of the piece. Note to readers: This document consists of a comic submission which is meant to be experienced visually: What is Engineering?. Each page of the comic is presented separately here, followed by text descriptions for that page. Text descriptions are provided for acces.

Dynamic interactions of neurological states

Point of view: Each of the creators are university researcher/professors of engineering; Linda is Eurasian/Latina and transgender, with a background in metallurgical engineering and materials science and engineering acquired in United States institutions; Nicola is a cis-gender woman, with a background in environmental engineering and educational research, who moved to the U.S. from Australia after completing her doctoral studies. Ruth is a cis-gender woman, born and raised in the U.S., of Western-European ancestry, with an educational background in biology and educational psychology. Although these identities do not represent the totality of what has shaped our view, we believe they have strongly influenced our experience of the field of engineering. Value of submission: This piece raises what we believe are important questions about our current education for engineers that are arising from the implications of recent neuroscience findings. Abstract According to the National Society of Professional Engineers’ (NSPE) creed, engineers are members of a profession who “dedicate [their] professional knowledge and skill to the advancement and betterment of human welfare.” Although the educational process of developing one’s engineering cognition has regional differences, by and large it derives from a core content that requires mechanical reasoning about the physical world. Results emerging from cognitive neuroscience imply that regions of the brain that function for mechanical reasoning have antagonistic relationships with regions that are active during moral and social reasoning, and vice versa. Their findings raise important questions for engineering education: How are we ensuring the balanced cognitive development necessary for the essential social and moral reasoning required of our profession? Can integrating Phenomenal activities with Physical activities serve holistic developmental aims? Can we envision integrative alternatives to present incarnations of engineering curricula? The intent of this paper is to offer reflections and speculations on the implications of these emerging neuroscientific findings on the dynamics of brain functioning for learning engineering.

Seeing Every Star

Point of View I am a white, mother of three children, and the product of a progressive elementary education. I have worked as a qualitative educational researcher for the past 25 years in the areas of equity and arts-integrated and student-centered practices in K-12 education. My experiences have shaped my worldview and deep concern with the ways our current system is damaging the humanity of all our children, particularly our most disenfranchised. My race, socio-economic status, and education have afforded me tremendous privilege and access to resources and advantage. I seek to use my privilege to shed light on what is possible and to show how we can envision a more hopeful, positive, and loving world for young people that truly nurture their spirits, hearts, and minds. Value of Submission The future of our planet depends upon an engaged, compassionate, brave and thoughtful citizenry. We are not currently on a trajectory to meeting those needs as far too many of our children are stuck in a broken system intended to feed our commerce-based economy rather than nurture our collective humanity. This visioning piece is designed to serve as an inspiration and call to action to do better by our children, especially those most underserved, undervalued and squashed by the inequities in our society.

"Talk Doesn't Cook the Soup"

The creator, Kenja McCray, is an Associate Professor of History at Atlanta Metropolitan State College (AMSC), where she teaches United States and African American history. AMSC is an institution within the University System of Georgia offering an affordable liberal arts education and committed to serving a diverse, urban student population. McCray has a B.A. from Spelman College, an M.A. from Clark Atlanta University, and a Ph.D. from Georgia State University. Her areas of interest are the 19th and 20th century U. S., African Americans, Africa and the diaspora, transnational histories, women, class and social history. The creator of this essay believes education should be a life-altering process, not only in the intellectual or the economic sense, but also cognitively uplifting. She experienced personal change in college through interacting with professors. She strives to give students a similarly inspirational experience. The encounter should be empowering and should change the way they see themselves and their relationships to the world. The intent of this creative piece is to share the creator’s contemplations on a rites of passage program in which she participated during her college years. She asserts that, given current cultural trends signaling a renewed interest in African-centered ideals and black pride, many aspects of the program could interest current students looking for safe spaces in increasingly intolerant times. This essay will interest researchers, student leaders, student activities advisors, and other administrators seeking to create and develop inclusive campus programs.