Engineering Education Professor Wins Award for Paper on the Ways Personal Identity Impacts Research

An engineering education study that began as a casual conversation between Assistant Professor Cassandra McCall and one of her colleagues recently received one of engineering education’s most prestigious awards.

McCall and Stephen Secules, an assistant professor at Florida International University, co-authored the paper “Positionality Practices and Dimensions of Impact on Equity Research: A Collaborative Inquiry and Call to the Community.” Other co-authors on the paper included Joel Alejandro Mejia, Chanel Beebe, Adam S. Masters, Matilde L. Sánchez-Peña and Martina Svyantek.

The paper was published in the Journal of Engineering Education and is an effort to expand the common discourse about the ways a researcher’s identity impacts their work. In March, the paper received the William Elgin Wickenden Award of the American Society for Engineering Education.

According to the award letter, “the annual Wickenden Award recognizes an article that represents the highest standards of scholarly research in engineering education among the articles published in the Journal in each volume year.”

The nature of the paper required vulnerability from McCall and her colleagues as they explored the ways their various identities — including race, disability and sexual orientation — played a role in their work as researchers. Because of this, McCall said it was especially rewarding to see the paper's reception.

“This paper has already taken off,” McCall said. “We’ve received a lot of great feedback from the community. We’ve had researchers from other institutions talk about how they’re now using that paper in their foundational engineering education classes or when they teach students how to think about positionality. It has already become more transformative than I initially thought.”

McCall said receiving the award also indicates to her a shift toward more people-focused research.

“Whether it’s the participants or the researchers, we’re starting to consider the individuals in research more,” she said.