Engineering is Not Neutral: Transforming Instruction via Collaboration and Engagement (ENNTICE)

It has never been clearer that engineering colleges need strengthened diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), but progress has been distressfully slow. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that engineering faculty themselves may be key inhibitors to this need. Why?

Because without training, the way faculty teach may, unintentionally, exclude various students and student groups. In order to create organizational culture that supports all students, this project will administer a three-year faculty learning community (FLC) with participants from all five departments in the College of Engineering, Design and Computing at the University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver).

The overarching goal of this FLC is to discover how to nudge engineering faculty to adopt known best practices for DEI. The three specific goals are: (1) to develop mindfulness among engineering faculty and deploy best practices known to be especially beneficial for minoritized students; (2) to cultivate inclusive engineering culture into every aspect of teaching, research, and service; and the bottom line: (3) to foster student belonging and success.

Taken together, these goals will allow the investigators to discover how to nudge faculty at research institutions to adopt known best practices for DEI, specifically self-inquiry, course design, creating community, advising, mentoring, and collegiality. The theoretical framework for this work is adapted from two recent Nobel-prize winning ideas from behavioral economics.

The first idea is that people are more intuitive than rational, which points to a change model called communities of transformation. The second idea is that people respond to nudging, which points to the change model layering. The FLC will provide a framework to test these ideas using a longitudinal study in which the FLC faculty are the test group and the remainder of the engineering faculty are the comparison group.

The proposed research promotes (1) full participation of women, persons with disabilities, and underrepresented minorities in STEM; (2) development of a diverse, globally competitive STEM workforce; and (3) improved STEM education and educator development by guiding engineering faculty to mindfully develop their capacity to implement known best practices for DEI.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.