A Garden, Not a Pipeline
It is past time to revise our model for diversifying engineering.
Opinion by Laura Bottomley
Engineers tend to understand the world by making models, which require assumptions that are both implicit and explicit. We readily recognize that all models are imperfect and can’t represent every part of a problem. However, a model that doesn’t accurately represent the problem variables will lead to erroneous results. Why is it, then, when we are thinking about why there is not equitable representation of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering, that we don’t question the model?
We have explained diversification of engineering through a pipeline metaphor for a long time. The model has shown up in places from psychology literature to papers for IEEE and ASEE. We have certainly modified it over the years—leaky pipelines and such—but we still have not seen a significant difference. The use of this model has led to actions centered on changing the students, rather than on making any change in the way we do business in the education enterprise.
A pipeline shapes the raw material that is put into it, and there is typically only one way in and one (successful) way out. The assumptions of the pipeline model lead to actions that apply “treatments” to students and potential students. We attempt to change them to fit the engineering world, whether by learning sufficient math or how to deal with bias and harassment. This approach removes responsibility from educators. Teach all comers, and teach them the same. After all, engineering is completely neutral, just like science—right?
As good engineers, we need to recognize that our model is not generating the results we need, so we should change it. Suppose, rather than a pipeline, we consider the diversification of STEM through the framework of a garden.
As another model, this one won’t be perfect either. However, it may lead us to develop new actions, based on its metaphors, that the pipeline would not cause us to ideate. For example, thinking about students as seeds enables us to realize that each one has potential, regardless of its origin. Some seeds have more stored energy when they are planted; some students arrive on campus with more social capital. The job of the gardener is to provide the fertilizer and water that each seed needs and to till the soil so that the seeds can develop and spread their own roots.
This aspect of the garden model implies that classroom experiences need to be more carefully curated for the students who show up, rather than repeatedly applying the same lectures and assignments that the pipeline model encourages. After all, nothing changes in the shape of the pipeline, but a garden may need more water during a drought. Sometimes the only water that a student needs is having their instructor know their name. Sometimes they need more guidance on how to learn. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve all seen that our students needed more guidance and support, and we did too.
What is compelling about the garden model is that it incorporates many of the research conclusions about factors that produce lasting results. The Engage Engineering project (https://www.engageengineering.org) cites three actions: deliberate teaching of spatial visualization, educator/student interaction, and using everyday examples. These all fit the model of a gardener rather than a sage-on-the-stage approach to engineering education.
What we are talking about is not semantics. We all have our mental models that guide how we navigate the world. These models can include various implicit biases, and if they don’t imply that we have any responsibility, then they certainly lead to the inaction that is keeping all kinds of minds from joining us in engineering. How many brilliant and creative students have been turned away from engineering because it presented to them as a round hole and they saw themselves as a square peg? How many students have never considered engineering because they were told they had to be geniuses in math? How many of us, as educators, have thought that certain students just didn’t belong in engineering? What model was the source of that thought?
A garden model may be just what we need to shake up our thinking and encourage us to acknowledge that we all share responsibility for tending our students. We need to change something! We have a lot of hard problems to solve, and we know that problems aren’t solved by the same kinds of minds that created them.
ASEE Fellow Laura Bottomley is an associate teaching professor of electrical engineering and elementary education at North Carolina State University. She also serves as director of Engineering Education, Women in Engineering, and The Engineering Place, the university’s K–20 education and resource headquarters for engineering and engineering education. This piece was based on Bottomley’s 2021 ASEE Annual Conference paper “A New Change Model for Recruitment and Retention of Underrepresented Groups in STEM” (https://bit.ly/3M0v3rj).