Shift Happens

TL;DR: The ongoing cultural shifts are influencing workplaces and learning environments, leading to changes in acceptable behaviors and practices. These shifts are shedding light on disparities based on gender, sex, race, and ethnicity, prompting a reevaluation of aspects of our culture and the need to question and defy what once served to define and reify marginalized and minority populations.

Abstract: Current cultural changes are spilling over into – or actually emanating from – our workplaces and learning environments. These changes constitute shifts in what we deem as acceptable or “normal.” Although I am writing this column as an editor, I’m not just talking about subtle editorial shifts like the now acceptable use of “their” instead of “his or her” (allowing for pluralities of identity as well as simplified wording) or accepting a sentence that ends with a preposition (a situation about which there has been much consternation). What I’m referring to here are not-so-subtle shifts on a larger scale. Weighty events and decisions that were unthinkable even just a few months ago, such as the #metoo movement, are shedding light on harassment and aggressions that once seemed inevitably ingrained into our workspaces and gathering places. As a result, we are poised to examine and change aspects of our culture that generate disparities based on gender, sex, race and ethnicity. We are empowered to question and defy what once served to define and reify the roles and experiences of marginalized and minority populations from the classroom to the boardroom. Alice Pawley’s guest editorial in the October 2017 issue of JEE challenged us to shift the “default” in engineering education (Pawley, 2017), moving “the burden of proof from the people advocating for the value of diversity to those supporting the status quo” (p. 531). In direct response, subtle changes are happening in the JEE editorial process. Starting with this issue, articles are going through an additional editorial step in which all authors are asked to explicitly include information on the gender and race/ethnicity of participants in their studies to the extent possible, and to explain any resulting limitations. As Pawley proposes, by always reporting the gender and race of participants in all research, whether or not it is focused on diversity, “we could begin to see how many studies make claims about people ‘in general’ when in fact the majority of their participants are white men” (p. 532). Note that only two of the articles in the current issue directly address diversity as a research topic: Secules et al., “Zooming Out from the Struggling Individual Student: An Account of the Cultural Construction of Engineering Ability in an Undergraduate Programming Class,” and Borrego et al., “Pursuing Graduate Study: Factors Underlying Undergraduate Engineering Students’ Decisions.” One example of a study in this issue that does not explicitly focus on diversity but is strengthened by including a diverse population is Lee et al.’s “Development of the Engineering Student Integration Instrument: Rethinking Measures of Integration.” Lee and his colleagues purposefully recruited participants from diverse backgrounds as they developed their model of student integration into engineering, with the goal of meeting the needs of diverse types of students. Other papers in this issue explicitly identify the broader impacts of including diverse types of participants. As you read them, I encourage you to consider the ways in which this shift enhances our understanding of diversity and inclusivity in engineering education. How might this shift affect your own work? Shift happens, and we are adapting. As researchers, we are called to answer Pawley’s challenge. We are called, too, to think more broadly about research questions, designs and