It Takes All Kinds: Incorporating Diversity Education in the Engineering Classroom

The ability to work on diverse teams is an essential professional skill, and a common innate learning objective in engineering classrooms. Team diversity is often accomplished by “balancing” teams with respect to characteristics such as past performance or gender, but the ability to create diverse teams can often be limited by class composition. Recognizing these limitations, a “diversity module” has been piloted in a technical communications course at a small, liberal arts institution in Fall semesters 2016 and 2017. The module is designed to expose students to, and engage them with, various aspects of diversity in the absence of an intrinsically diverse classroom composition, as well as allow them to reflect on their own professional and personal experiences. Specifically, this module includes activities about implicit bias, stereotype threat, and cross cultural competence. Student response has largely been positive, and student reflection assignments have demonstrated critical thinking on the matter. As this is a recent pilot intervention, long-term longitudinal effects have yet to be investigated. Included here are descriptions of the module activities, generalized student responses, and instructor perspective. While this topic is of great importance to all educators, it is often difficult to incorporate such material in well-established courses. Thus, new engineering educators may find these activities and ideas particularly useful as they begin to establish their teaching practices. Background and Motivation Diversity of race, ethnicity, and gender are among just some of the classifications that are highly valued in the present day workforce, with diversity initiatives springing from academic institutions and companies alike. Despite these efforts to increase classroom and cubicle diversity, there are limitations to how much diversity can be achieved in some of these settings. While data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reveal that diversity with respect to measures such as race and ethnicity has been increasing among American college students nationally [1], this diversity is not uniformly spread across campuses. The majority of college students in the United States attend public institutions regardless of racial or ethnic background [2]. It may appear from aggregate data that diversity at varying institution types (public vs. private, two-year vs. four-year, etc.) follows national demographic trends, however, these numbers are confounded by the distinctly different demographics found in Historically Black Colleges and Universities [3], Hispanic Serving Institutions [4], and Tribal Colleges [5]. At these institutions, the race or ethnicity served is disproportionately represented compared to national demographics. The modules described here focus on exposing students to perspectives that stem from diversity of race, ethnicity, and culture. Such diversity in the classroom and on campus has been shown to have a positive impact on cognitive development [6-8], but this diversity is not always intrinsically available. Thus, when classroom diversity with respect to these demographics is lacking, it often falls on the educator to simulate these diverse perspectives to enhance student learning. As educators, we strive to prepare our students for “the real world,” which includes interacting with diverse colleagues in a diverse global workforce. Furthermore, as global industry becomes more and more interconnected [9, 10], it is highly likely that our engineering students will not only work with colleagues of diverse backgrounds but also have several international experiences throughout their career. For these reasons, awareness of diversity issues, biases, and general cross-cultural competence are critical professional skills that are not explicitly addressed in most engineering curricula. Opportunities to authentically expose our students to experiences that build awareness and cross-cultural competence is limited by the diversity (or lack thereof) of our own classrooms and campuses. Students in classrooms that happen to be less diverse may thus experience an unintentional impediment to professional development as they prepare for “the real world.” Technical and professional communication (TPC) is one essential professional skill that is, in many ways, intertwined with diversity. Organizational demography has been shown to have varying correlations with workplace communication [11, 12], including employees tending to communicate more often with those of similar age group or tenure [13]. It is natural to imagine that this extends to demographics of race, ethnicity, and culture. Our understanding of communication norms, our contextualization of situations, and our interpretation of nonverbal cues depend largely on previous experiences. Our experiences, in turn, can be shaped by our racial, ethnic, or cultural background. The absence of being able to consistently have a classroom of diverse students in an engineering-specific TPC course at a small liberal arts institution was the inspiration and motivation behind developing the “diversity module” described here.