When I wrote a JEE editorial recently about “white humility” (Secules, 2023), I asked about epistemology, or how we know what we know. I pointed to a few intersecting aspects: each person’s individual epistemology, an engineering epistemology we may have some understanding of, an engineering education community epistemology we may need to define, and a white people’s collective epistemology that we may feel is uncomfortable to pinpoint. I suggested that each of these could have a tendency towards confidence / over confidence, and that we might all benefit from a sense of humility regarding what we don’t know. To me, a sense of humility regarding what we don’t know is a worthy orientation that could help us when approaching topics about difference and marginalization that is outside of our own experience.

Furthermore, I’ve been thinking lately about similar epistemological trends for broadening participation, or diversity equity inclusion (DEI) type research and scholarship. How do we know what we know about DEI? I’ve been thinking about this because I notice this pattern where lots of our papers begin with a similar refrain “we’ve been generating lots of new knowledge about DEI, we’ve been funding lots of initiatives, yet the numbers aren’t changing.” It’s an easy go to logic, it isn’t a lie, but if we think it’s true it has to be frustrating and we need to question ourselves eventually. What in fact are we doing with our federal dollars and our peer reviewed papers and the time we all spent on all of those items? Is what we’re doing mattering? I’m an intellectually curious person, but more than that I’m a pragmatic and somewhat impatient person. If I don’t think what I’m or we’re doing matters, I want to question it, reorient myself, and change it up.

So I’m thinking again about epistemology, how we know what we know, what the evidence is in DEI. If we think we’ve been generating knowledge about DEI and we know many more things, how come what we know isn’t more directly useful or tangible? For one thing, I think we have a tendency (and again, it’s not wrong) to want to listen to student voices, to adopt a constructivist epistemology / interpretivist theoretical framework, and to use qualitative methods to present the world through students’ eyes. I think this is typically a helpful starting place and something I too feel an impulse to do. But perhaps it’s only a starting point and one mode of operation and it’s not the only, primary, or most useful thing we could be doing with our time over the long term.

Further, a university, or the entire scope of engineering or STEM professions, is such a large and complex system, I think it can leave us paralyzed in trying to be tangible about what works in DEI. We set our sites on what is doable for an individual researcher. I will set the research question of… “what do [sample size number of] students who identify as [marginalized identity group] say are their [sources of community cultural wealth, experiences of microaggressions, identity experience in engineering, etc.]?” As implications we suggest that those studies give resources and ways for engineering education to become more responsive and to utilize the perspectives of these students in curricular design or programmatic design. And yet, in our next study we don’t go and attempt the study we suggested for others. And we don’t, as a measure of success, follow up with others to find whether they have used our findings in those ways. Instead, we carve out another doable study that we are well-resourced and well-trained to conduct, we read narrowly in order to conduct that study, and we don’t really ask tough questions about the rest of the systems and people around us.

This might sound cynical, but I don’t feel cynical about this process. It’s a bit frustrating, but I understand why each group does the work that is available to them and why we don’t often think completely out of the box, looking at the entire system, to find the most useful study we could possibly conduct. If we had the time and the resources to consider the question, how would we even identify that study? In a complex system, what one small part should we undertake that will make a difference? So I don’t blame any individuals for having their presumed and limited role in the collective. In addition to not knowing what to do, I anticipate a lot of others might disagree with me for some reason. Perhaps they think critical and/or qualitative research always has inherit value to make the world a better place, without questioning whether there is an audience reading it or its value proposition. Perhaps they are just firm believers in the theories they use and feel all their work must be guided by them.

For me, it is a bit scary territory, but I’ve started thinking about new ways of knowing about DEI topics. When might a quantitative experimental or quasi-experimental study help me to know something about how some DEI intervention or insight (something I generated from other, qualitative research) is really effective? What can I learn about structural or policy analysis that helps understand both mechanisms of marginalization and levers for change? My experience, training, and research group are all very qualitatively focused, and I don’t intend to change that, entirely. I think my role relative to most engineering education (faculty instructors and researchers) has been that there are a lot of qualitative insights I can help provide that aren’t obvious to others. But relative to what I see the overall DEI community doing, I think there is a need for more creative thinking outside of the box of the…normal qualitative research thing. So I may need new collaborators and to find a new way to pivot to have role with the collective that I think is pushing towards more useful change. I’m hoping to keep calling for and iterating towards creative and action oriented equity research with whichever methodological approaches are most suited to the task.

Secules, S. (2023), On the importance of (white) humility: Epistemological decentering as a positional orientation toward research. J Eng Educ, 112: 258-261. https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20508

Secules, S. & McCall, C. (2023). What Research Can DO: Rethinking Qualitative Research Designs to Promote Change Towards Equity and Inclusion. Studies in Engineering, 4(1), 26–45. https://doi.org/10.21061/see.96