Diversity Research in an Engineering Technology Program: Promising Practices for Diversity Research Initiatives in Post-secondary Education

While efforts are underway to solve gender disparity in engineering, there tends to be a focus on gender at the expense of other diversity considerations. Few Canadian universities collect data about their racialized student population despite human rights advocates and the government of Ontario endorsing such an approach to uncover inequality and better understand the needs of Canada’s growing diverse student population. Of those universities that collect demographic information on their student body, few studies dig deep enough to understand how students’ identities affect their learning experience. The proposed study goes further to understand faculty, staff and student experiences around teaching and learning. This study views educational experiences holistically (within and outside the classroom) in order to understand how participants face discrimination or exclusion. In this paper, the authors provide an overview of demographic surveys at Canadian universities and describe McMaster University’s recent work in this area. The authors then provide a study overview and our intended next steps. It is the hope that this research, and affiliated workshops, will help faculty and staff better understand the lived experiences of discrimination that our students face, and may help illuminate bias and barriers within our educational offerings that go unnoticed