The IEC Social Justice Workshop Series 2021

Recent events have brought systemic racism and racial injustice in all facets of society into sharp focus. The Inclusive Engineering Consortium (IEC) recognizes the need and opportunity this has created to stimulate action on creating a more just and welcoming environment for underrepresented minorities in engineering education. We acknowledge that personal and institutional biases and inequitable practices affect underrepresented minorities, including faculty and students in electrical and computer engineering (ECE).

IEC members are committed and compelled by our mission to make a stand together along with all academic institutions in treating everyone with equity and respect, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender identity or orientation, age, disability, citizen status, or national origin. Accordingly, we propose to deliver a series of capacity-building workshops during the first two quarters of 2021 that will 1) promote an understanding of these inequitable patterns and 2) introduce participants to frameworks that help to counter them.

More specifically, we believe that these educational experiences will foster the ability to identify actionable steps to mitigate the deleterious effects of exclusion in engineering education, and facilitate collaboration across individuals and institutions in a way that begins to facilitate tangible change.

The IEC Social Justice Workshop Series will be organized before and after the 2021 Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads (ECEDHA) conference series in March 2021 in order to disseminate the results and recommendations to representatives of over 230 ECE departments across the US and Canada, and establish meaningful policies and programs to counter institutional bias in engineering. The workshop series takes a unique approach to addressing institutional bias in engineering education starting with a recently formed consortium of HBCU and HSI ECE programs (the IEC) to address first from their perspective the existing institutional gaps and barriers to underrepresented students and faculty in engineering, and from there develop a set of consistent and actionable recommendations that will be taken to a broader audience of ECE programs in the country (ECEDHA) for discussion and refinement, providing a guidebook, concrete policy changes and innovative programs that can be implemented in ECE departments.

The successful implementation of meaningful changes in ECE programs to counter systemic racism will be broadly translatable to other engineering programs and STEM education where historically barriers exist to underrepresented students and faculty. The broader outcomes of such programs will be increased enrollment in STEM fields and increased diversity of the students and faculty to be more reflective of the overall population, leading to an increase in the domestic STEM workforce necessary to meet critical skill needs in the future economy.

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.