Collaborative Research: Planning: Track 1 for Catalyzing a Paradigm Shift towards an Inclusive Engineering for Community Development

这一规划赠款将使工程公平中心（CEE）第一阶段项目提案具有竞争性和合作性。该中心的提案旨在实现社区发展工程（ECD）的研究和实践，为所有学生，特别是有色人种学生提供转型体验。通过在选定的合作机构中建立一个分布式中心，我们正在寻求启动并维持幼儿发展向包容性教学原则的转变。这一转变将消除传统幼儿发展的局限性，传统幼儿发展往往会将某些民族排除在外，强化刻板印象，并使伙伴社区产生更多需求。以包容性的幼儿发展替代，可以专门为有色人种学生、他们的资产和需求提供帮助，同时对合作社区产生积极影响，以加强扩大工程参与的努力。在进行这项研究时，我们将了解如何克服服务学习在公平教育所有学生方面的局限性。更具体地说，如果服务学习要支持来自少数族裔背景的学生的教育，那么我们必须研究ECD，考虑到来自这些不同背景的学生的具体需求。这项工作将对学生、社区合作伙伴和高等教育机构产生影响，促进面向所有人的幼儿发展，通过变革性的经验支持历史上属于少数群体的学生，鼓励他们留在工程领域并取得成功。通过加强和创建广泛的包容性和与文化相关的ECD方法、背景和数据收集方法，中心开展的研究将使整个研究到实践周期的努力成为可能，系统地将历史上被边缘化的学生和社区纳入ECD计划。为了实现这一目标并最大限度地提高提案获得资助的机会，将在计划提案中实现以下主要目标：通过定期的虚拟会议使核心团队保持一致；清晰表达研究的核心概念；开发初始Delphi提示符；计划和执行德尔菲法的发现阶段；进行为期两天的密集讲习班；利用Delphi的前两个阶段的信息编写并完善提案。这一努力将产生关于什么是包容性幼儿发展以及如何在实践中实现这一目标的新知识。通过支持包容性和与文化相关的ECD实践，将支持历史上少数民族人口的学生在ECD计划中获得变革性成果，并进一步增加留在工程领域并取得成功的可能性。最终，在白宫科技政策办公室的推动下，联邦资助的研究将向前推进，从开始（产生研究问题）到结束（研究成果），都将努力包括社区知识和兴趣（国家科学院，2022年）。因此，将社区纳入ECD提供的研究和设计将挑战STEM（科学，技术，工程和数学）教育，以培养能够与当地社区有效互动和共同发展的学生劳动力，并且具有足够的多样性，能够理解种族，民族和社会经济多样化社区的现实和挑战。通过开发和探索包容性的、与文化相关的幼儿发展背景，这一规划拨款，以及全额拨款，可以利用幼儿发展问题领域和背景，批判性地参与边缘化和社会正义问题，促进工程教育中多样化和公平的幼儿发展参与。总的来说，这些影响将加强工程院校作为扩大参与的工具的能力。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This planning grant will enable the development of a competitive and collaborative Centers for Equity in Engineering (CEE) Phase I project proposal. The Center proposal seeks to enable the research and practice of an Engineering for Community Development (ECD) that provides transformational experiences to all students, especially students of color. Through creating a distributed center across selected partner institutions, we are seeking to initiate and sustain a shift within ECD towards the principles of inclusive pedagogy. Such a shift will eliminate the limitations of traditional ECD, which can often exclude groups of peoples, reinforce stereotypes, and leave partner communities wanting more. Replacement with an inclusive ECD can specifically provide for students of color, their assets, and their needs while positively impacting partner communities to strengthen efforts of broadening participation in engineering. In conducting this research, we will understand the ways in which the limitations of service-learning’s ability to equitably educate all students can be overcome. More specifically, if service-learning is going to support the education of students from minoritized backgrounds, then we must research ECD with respect to the specific needs of students from these various backgrounds. This work will impact students, community partners, and institutions of higher education through promoting ECD that is inclusive to all, where students from historically minoritized demographics will be supported through transformational experiences that encourage them to remain and succeed in engineering. Through strengthening and creating a broad array of inclusive and culturally relevant ECD approaches, contexts, and data collection methods the research performed by the Center will enable effort across the research-to-practice cycle that systematically includes historically marginalized students and communities into ECDinitiatives. To accomplish this goal and maximize the chances of a funded proposal, the following primary objectives will be met within the planning proposal: Align core team through regular virtual meetings; Articulate core concept of research; Develop initial Delphi prompts; Plan and perform discovery phases of a Delphi method; Conduct an intensive two day workshop; And write and refine proposal using information from first two phases of Delphi. This effort will produce new knowledge on what an inclusive ECD is and how it can be accomplished in practice. Through supporting inclusive and culturally relevant ECD practice, students from historically minoritized demographics will be supported to obtain transformational outcomes within ECD initiatives and by extension increase the likelihood to remain and succeed in engineering. Ultimately, as promoted by the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the White House, federally funded research will, moving forward, try to include community knowledge and interest from its inception (generating research questions) to its conclusion (research deliverables) (National Academies, 2022). Hence, this inclusion of communities in research and design that ECD offers will challenge STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education at large to develop a student workforce capable of effectively interacting and co-developing with local communities and being diverse enough to empathize with the realities and challenges of racially, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse communities. Through developing and exploring inclusive and culturally relevant ECD contexts, this planning grant, and in turn, the full grant, can enable the use of ECD problem domains and contexts that critically engage issues of marginalization and social justice to promote diverse and equitable ECD participation within engineering education. Collectively, these impacts will strengthen engineering institutions’ ability to serve as vehicles for broadening participation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.