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Inclusive Course Design Checklist: A Living Document for Faculty to Create Inclusive Classrooms

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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

Faculty Development Division (FDD) Technical Session 3

Tagged Division

Faculty Development Division (FDD)

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

21

DOI

10.18260/1-2--43622

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/43622

Download Count

118

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Paper Authors

biography

Swetha Nittala Uber Technologies

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Swetha is currently a People Science Researcher at Uber. Prior to this she worked as a Lecturer and a Science and Engineering Education Fellow at the Mechanical Engineering Department, Stanford University. She completed her PhD from the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University where she focused on identifying and developing leadership and other socio-technical capabilities among engineering students and professionals. She is passionate about improving engineering education and practice and has been working in the areas of innovation, leadership development, inclusion, ethics, and, faculty development leveraging design research and mixed methods approaches.

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biography

Sheri D. Sheppard Stanford University

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Sheri D. Sheppard, Ph.D., P.E., is professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. Besides teaching both undergraduate and graduate design and education related classes at Stanford University, she conducts research on engineering education and

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biography

Helen L. Chen Stanford University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-6415-7814

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Helen L. Chen is a Research Scientist in the Designing Education Lab in Mechanical Engineering and co-founder of the Integrative Learning Portfolio Lab in Career Education at Stanford University. She earned her undergraduate degree from UCLA and her PhD in Communication with a minor in Psychology from Stanford. Her scholarship is focused on engineering and entrepreneurship education, portfolio pedagogy, reflective practices, non-degree credentials, and reimagining how learners represent themselves through their professional online presence.

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Abstract

This evidence-based practice paper highlights a framework of inclusive teaching practices and strategies developed for the mechanical engineering department at Stanford University to enable faculty to create inclusive classrooms. There is a growing consensus among educators and policymakers that inclusive learning outcomes lead to better student outcomes. Yet, there seems to be a general lack of awareness about how to create inclusive classrooms. To address this gap, we developed an inclusive and equitable course design checklist that enables faculty to proactively incorporate inclusive principles into various aspects of their course design, including syllabi, content, assessment, and pedagogy. With input from students, educators, and instructors, this checklist is primarily designed for mechanical engineering faculty, with an emphasis on aspects such as design and laboratories. Still, it can be widely applied to other engineering courses.

Furthermore, our paper seeks to shed light on the dynamic nature of such checklists. Given that our understanding of learning and human identity continues to evolve, we must continually re-evaluate how we perceive equity and inclusivity in education. Hence, we envision our checklist as a living document that requires periodic iteration and feedback. To this end, we recently conducted workshops with students and faculty members from the same university one year after the initial release of the checklist to ensure that we are up-to-date with our thinking about inclusive teaching practices.

This paper presents the inclusive course design checklist and the methodology we followed to develop and refine the framework. Our hope is for faculty and instructors to learn from and leverage this checklist to design equitable and inclusive courses, as well as to contribute their learnings to a living checklist document that can be shared more broadly beyond one institution.

Nittala, S., & Sheppard, S. D., & Chen, H. L. (2023, June), Inclusive Course Design Checklist: A Living Document for Faculty to Create Inclusive Classrooms Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43622

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