The Nuts & Bolts of D.E.I.

One of the major Fall tasks that I was assigned was to locate research and theory that supported the work being done by Diversity Engagement, Training, and Education. This task was also assigned to another graduate intern, my fellow cohort member, Miyah Wilson. As I understand it based on OIED's website and informal conversations with Beverly Williams, that work includes:

• Preparing campus community members to be change agents for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
• Increasing the campus community's awareness of inequalities and oppression in higher education.
• Building a critical capacity for institutional transformation through training and education toward the mission of OIED: a more "inclusive, accessible and diverse intellectual and cultural campus experience" (OIED, 2019).

So, where does one begin to look for research that can provide a framework for DETE's work? I thought I would begin where any good researcher begins: Their institution's library. Here at NC State University, we are privileged to have access to an incredible amount of scholarship through our library's extensive catalogue of physical and digital texts, including scholarly journals. For educators, one of the usual sub-catalogues is the Educational Resource Information Center (ERIC), which contains research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. It is generally a good source and is the first place that I started my search.

But any good search must begin with good search words, and so I tried my hand at quite a few: diversity education; diversity training; social justice education; social change theories; multicultural education; cultural competency; organizational change; campus climate. And this is where I ran into a common problem that I have when conducting a review of the literature - the vast amount of information available. My initial search of peer-reviewed, fully-available research for "diversity education" alone returned 1,717 results. This isn't necessarily a bad problem since it means scholars are actively engaging in this area and good research must exist. However, it does raise the question: How do you distinguish between what research is good and worth including and what can be - and has been - disregarded? My basic process: Skim the abstract and findings of articles with compelling titles written in the past six years from journals I knew or sounded like a discipline standard. Slowly, I started to piece together a list for deeper diving and key highlights.

As Miyah and I both shared when we later met to discuss the assignment, much of the research was tied to human resources, medical fields, and corporate diversity training. When the two of us met to share our preliminary findings, we discussed whether or not these studies could be applied to DETE or if their outcomes or driving purposes were too dissimilar to be applicable here. Coming from a fairly interdisciplinary background, I advocated for the transferability of knowledge - that we needn't silo ourselves only to studies focused on higher education, although that should still be our priority for narrowing the number of studies to review.

We're still actively working on this task but are expected to present our findings to the DETE office at the final Fall meeting on December 17, 2019.