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Designing, Codifying, and Implementing Social Justice Content in a Required Course on Engineering and Research Skills for First-Year Graduate Students

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Conference

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Baltimore , Maryland

Publication Date

June 25, 2023

Start Date

June 25, 2023

End Date

June 28, 2023

Conference Session

Equity, Culture & Social Justice in Education Division (EQUITY) Technical Session 8

Tagged Divisions

Equity and Culture & Social Justice in Education Division (EQUITY)

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

24

DOI

10.18260/1-2--43005

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/43005

Download Count

251

Paper Authors

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Kavitha Chintam Northwestern University

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Kavitha Chintam is a Ph.D. Candidate at Northwestern University in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.

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Alexis N. Prybutok University of Washington Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-7426-8005

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Alex Prybutok (she/her) is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Washington. She earned her B.S. in Chemical Engineering and her B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016 and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University in 2022. Her areas of expertise include computational modeling of cell-based therapies and integrating social justice concepts into engineering curriculum.

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Chloé M. Archuleta

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Adrien Deberghes

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Beth DiBiase

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Ruihan Li

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Jeffrey Richards

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Linsey Seitz

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Jennifer Cole Northwestern University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-7104-2986

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Jennifer L. Cole is the Assistant Chair in Chemical and Biological Engineering in the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and the Associate Director of the Northwestern Center for Engineering Education Research at Northwestern University.

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Abstract

The field of engineering has traditionally been taught with the focus on the technical content, decoupling the scientific and technological advances from the societal goals and impacts (both intended and unintended) stemming from those advances. Not all members of society equally benefit from, contribute to the development of, or bear the burdens of the development process of engineering solutions to societal challenges. We believe that decoupling engineering from its impact on society devalues the social justice context of engineering and can further exacerbate the inequities of engineering research and advances. Further, we believe this content should be part of the engineering curriculum. We aim to address this by including curriculum and critical reflections on social justice and anti-racism centered around engineering research and development to a two-quarter long graduate student professional development course for matriculating PhD and MS students. To our knowledge, no other engineering graduate program has yet studied this kind of intervention. We aim to understand how students engage with social justice content in the contexts of engineering and research, specifically when presented with such content in a classroom setting. We seek to understand how student-student, student-faculty, and student-teaching assistant interactions impact student learning and comfort in discussing social justice. Our research questions probe students’ personal assessments of confidence and comfort in discussing social justice content through three surveys presented at different stages of the premiere iteration of the first quarter of the course in Fall 2022: at the beginning, mid-point, and end of the course. Additionally, weekly journal reflections from students are studied to track students’ reactions over time and evaluate the effectiveness of each lesson in achieving course objectives. This study, which will continue to be conducted over many years to track multiple cohorts of graduate students, aims to understand these interactions to ultimately aid engineering departments in implementing social justice content into their curricula; here we will highlight the findings from the course’s launch. In turn, the next generation of engineering researchers will not only be technically proficient, but also socially conscious in their careers, innovations, and lives.

Chintam, K., & Prybutok, A. N., & Archuleta, C. M., & Deberghes, A., & DiBiase, B., & Li, R., & Richards, J., & Seitz, L., & Cole, J. (2023, June), Designing, Codifying, and Implementing Social Justice Content in a Required Course on Engineering and Research Skills for First-Year Graduate Students Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43005

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