Broadening Participation in Engineering as a Sociopolitical Phenomenon: A Systems Perspective

Background: Engineers, educators, and policymakers throughout the United States have been trying to diversify engineering for decades. In response to this shared aspiration, professionals and educators from engineering and other STEM disciplines have constructed Broadening Participation as a phenomenon involving individual and collective efforts in the form of both research and practice.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to advance the science of Broadening Participation by explaining the relationship between research and practice in this context.

Scope: As part of a larger project funded by the National Science Foundation focused on Broadening Participation-efforts aimed at Black Americans, we used Ecological Systems Theory to organize insights from literature, interviews with subject matter experts, and the collective sensemaking of our author team.

Discussion/Conclusions: Our insights highlight how Broadening Participation is a sociopolitical phenomenon resulting from social, political, and historical influences related to diversifying engineering. We share these insights in language familiar to engineers (i.e., systems thinking) in hopes to advance stakeholders’ understanding of Broadening Participation. In doing so, our aim is to give the field of engineering an alternative heuristic for conceptualizing, discussing, and approaching Broadening Participation. Though this paper is primarily written from the perspective of Black Americans, it is intended to be useful to the field broadly.