Center: Track 4: Creating a Teaching Engineering Equity Center

Engineering, as a discipline that seeks to improve the common good, should be inclusive and equitable in its outcomes, education, and practice. Engineering, however, doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The biases known to exist in society are baked into the application of technologies and systems.

One example is the design of computer algorithms that benefit one group over another, whether it’s the accuracy of facial recognition or decisions about job opportunities. When engineers represent a small percentage of races, genders, abilities, ethnicities and backgrounds, the needs of the population are not adequately considered. In addition, the environments in which those engineers do their work are less likely to be inclusive and free from behaviors that inhibit everyone’s ability to do their best work.

While engineering schools must provide the technical training needed to convert the knowledge of nature into technology, engineering education is incomplete without incorporating how the work integrates with other fields such as ethics, social science, the humanities, and matters associated with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Michigan Engineering is taking a people-first approach to engineering, preparing engineers to be socio-technical experts who have a well-honed ability and desire to evaluate their work and its impact on the world from multiple perspectives.

This project will create the Teaching Engineering Equity Center to improve inclusion and equity in Engineering disciplines. The goal is to create teaching environments where equity-centered values are present in both technical content and teaching style, leading to engineering education where students from a variety of backgrounds will experience inclusion and belonging, and engineering solutions that help to close critical gaps and elevate all people.

This work aligns with the NSF’s Broadening Participation in Engineering Program objective to foster collaboration that supports the professional development of a diverse and prepared engineering workforce as well as innovative, if not revolutionary, approaches to building capacity through inclusivity and equity within the engineering academic experience.

This project will focus on three specific objectives to address these challenges. The project team will:

1. Design an evidence-based framework for creating an equity in engineering centered curriculum. The framework will center on the integration of equity-based pedagogies and concepts from other disciplines and incorporate inclusive teaching philosophies.

It will include approaches to overcome the cultural barriers to DEI in engineering, including the erroneous assumptions that engineering is a purely rational endeavor, that technical considerations have more value than social concerns, and that advancement in the field is based on merit.

2) Generate a library of DEI learning activities within specific engineering contexts and disciplines. These modules will be designed to integrate into discipline-specific technical courses. Such integration avoids the "add-on" approach that makes DEI content seem less relevant. The modules will allow instructors to demonstrate how social concerns and issues of equity result in more effective technical designs.

3) Develop a replicable and adaptive training and implementation infrastructure to enable engineering instructors and mentors to use the learning activities. Instructor training will build on the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching in Engineering’s modules created specifically for incorporating DEI concepts. The approach will include the highly successful Teaching Circles for faculty peer mentoring on effectively using the modules from the library.

Project evaluation will be centered on testing the hypothesis that our approach, embedding DEI content directly into the engineering curriculum, both equips students and instructors with strategies for equitable engineering practice and improves the engineering climate.

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.