In this annual address on the State of the School, it is customary for us to reflect on where we have come, where we are now, and where we are going. This extraordinary pandemic year – more accurately spanning 18 months and counting – has brought us challenge, change, uncertainty and adversity that reveal much to us about who we are.

An engineering workforce is essential for society to meet our current and future challenges. By understanding how students find their graduation majors in engineering, we can improve in-major retention and graduation rates so that students find their engineering graduation discipline quickly without having multiple major changes during their undergraduate studies.

The lived realities and systemic barriers Latinx engineering students often face have been silenced and replaced by stories of inadequacy and deficits. The current national discourse on anti-racism requires that we shift our attention to conversations that challenge those deficit perspectives. This type of engineering and research gatekeeping erases different ways of knowing, doing and being – a process de Sousa Santos describes as epistemological injustice.

Although prior research has examined engineering students’ identity development, a gap in the literature exists related to students’ emotional experiences of shame, which undergird the socially constructed expectations of their professional formation.

In this seminar Thomas and Campbell will speak about what it means to do research and evaluation from a culturally responsive and racialized and social justice perspective (CR/SJP).

In this seminar, we will describe two studies conducted by researchers at the University of Georgia (UGA) that examined how faculty, staff, and students experienced the COVID-19 crisis. Both studies used a novel, mixed methods research approach called SenseMaker. SenseMaker is an action-oriented and participatory approach that combines rich, first-hand narratives with the statistical power of quantitative data. It is designed to inquire into and change complex social systems.