Call without Response: Faculty Perceptions about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Current and historical sociopolitical national events have brought diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to the forefront of discussion in academia. In response to this surge in social awareness of DEI, universities nationwide put forth plans and proposals for inclusive campus communities and initiatives to promote diversity. Educators, including engineering faculty, play a critical role in guiding students through these complex conversations. Based on this responsibility, we need to understand the state of faculty's knowledge levels and willingness to engage in these topics. The purpose of this study is to perform a systematic literature review of engineering education journals and conference proceedings to answer the research question: What themes emerge in current and previous EER on engineering faculty readiness to address DEI topics in their programs and classrooms? Our literature review consisted of a search through three conference-paper and five journalarticle databases for faculty beliefs about DEI from 2000 to 2021. Any student-centered studies and non-engineering faculty studies were excluded. Once a preliminary set of articles was found, we performed secondary and tertiary rounds of exclusion to compile a set of 22 articles that addressed our research question. This limited number of articles demonstrates that faculty beliefs about DEI are not commonly studied or discussed in engineering education research (EER). Because DEI is an essential topic in education and engineering, this result suggests a significant gap in EER community knowledge. With this gap in mind, we thematically analyzed the 22 articles that met the inclusion criteria to understand what faculty beliefs EER has focused on. The main result of this analysis was our proposed model, the Problematization-to-Action Continuum (PTAC), which highlights faculty's readiness to make change efforts toward promoting DEI. The PTAC model is a single-axis continuum that contains three defined points (each end and the center). On one end, engineering faculty do not acknowledge there are problems concerning DEI, and there are no actions taken toward bettering these issues. In the center, faculty acknowledge that there are problems but feel they lack knowledge to take actionable steps to alleviate them. On the other end, faculty recognize patterns of inequity and actively intervene to promote inclusive practices. The largest grouping of papers on the PTAC (N=11 of 22) was located at the center of the model, revealing that there is an acknowledgement of the need for increased DEI efforts, but little action has been taken toward these efforts. Overall, this literature review showed that there is an understanding of the responsibility to act regarding DEI efforts but a lack of knowledge or resources to execute and sustain DEI practices and policies. Future work involves investigating faculty's role in action plans for DEI policy change. By addressing faculty's role in these initiatives, we can support engineering faculty to engage in meaningful dialogue with all stakeholders and implement research-based strategies for improving DEI in their local academic institutions. The collective impact of strategically including faculty in DEI efforts will further the national conversation about the importance of DEI to make lasting change in our educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]