(312b) Incorporating Diversity and Bias Awareness in a Technical and Professional Communication Course

The ability to work on diverse teams is commonly accepted as a desirable trait for the professional engineer. While many instructors attempt to create diverse team experiences by balancing teams for performance, gender, or other factors, the diversity that can be achieved on teams is limited by the class composition. This varies greatly by institution type (large public institution vs. small private institution), location (city vs. rural), and degree program (highly structured vs. flexible).

Recognizing that there are limitations to our ability to expose students to authentic experiences on diverse teams, it is important to engage them in thinking about diversity as they may encounter it in the “real world.” To this end, a diversity module was added to a Technical and Professional Communication course. The pilot version of this module included: 1) defining and exploring implicit biases; 2) defining and reflecting on stereotype threat “traps”; and 3) a culture game that highlights how we can observe, analyze, and adapt to perceived differences in order to achieve common goals.

While the course has always required some consideration of diversity to achieve the understanding audience learning objective, these concepts had not explicitly been considered previously. Student feedback on the module was highly positive, and indicated a deeper level of thinking on diversity issues (anecdotally) when compared to previous classes.

Future work includes adopting the diversity module as a regular component of the Technical and Professional Communication course, and incorporating socially-relevant engineering topics in technical courses as well.