(190b) Incorporating Diversity Equality & Inclusion Training into First-Year Chemical Engineering Curriculum

STEM fields, particularly engineering disciplines, have struggled to attract, welcome in, and retain students from a diversity of backgrounds. From the undergraduate population up to the faculty level, significant disparages still exist in engineering colleges along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and more. However, a department's climate for underrepresented groups can be difficult to change and negative behaviors or attitudes among students can be self-propagating; as such, setting the tone and expectations early for a student body is important.

We have integrated diversity equality and inclusion (DE&I) training into both semesters of our first-year curriculum, with the aim to set a first impression that communicates the importance of DE&I to our department and to our students’ eventual careers as chemical engineers. One significant hurdle encountered early in these efforts was to maintain investment in these topics by students who are traditionally over represented in engineering fields. This work focuses on means to obtain early “buy-in” from all first-year students in our program and empower underrepresented students to address deficiencies in department culture.

In our fall semester Introduction to Chemical Engineering Course we use several strategies to promote DE&I for our first year students. Primary among these strategies is a three lecture series on engineering ethics; this totals about three hours of interactive material on engineering ethics, two-thirds of which focuses solely on DE&I as an integral part to engineering ethics. DE&I topics are introduced through the lenses and language of engineering to better connect to the target audience and emphasize their relevance.

In the second semester of the first year we have students in our Chemical Engineering Design & Innovation course, which is a much more active hands-on learning environment, in which students work in teams on open-ended team-based projects. It is in this course in which DE&I training is most often put to practice, because student will work on a team for about two weeks with almost every peer in their section. Significant efforts are made to establish a climate of inclusion in the makerspace and lab areas in which this course occurs, and students receive additional training in conflict resolution.

In this talk I will discuss the various DE&I methods implemented, which we have found to be effective in these two very different courses. I will also present some evidence of efficacy from student surveys, observations, and free-form responses. In sum, while there is always more DE&I ground to be gained, we see significant evidence that we have created a more welcoming, equitable, and inclusive environment for our first-year students, one that has reached into the later years of our curriculum.