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

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Conference

2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Salt Lake City, Utah

Publication Date

June 23, 2018

Start Date

June 23, 2018

End Date

July 27, 2018

Conference Session

Classroom Strategies – New Engineering Educators Division

Tagged Division

New Engineering Educators

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

9

DOI

10.18260/1-2--30739

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/30739

Download Count

393

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Paper Authors

biography

Elif Miskioglu Bucknell University

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Elif Miskioglu is currently an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Bucknell University. She graduated from Ohio State University in 2015 with a PhD in Chemical Engineering, and is interested in student learning in engineering. In particular, her work focuses on various aspects of students' development from novice to expert, including development of engineering intuition, as well as critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills.

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Abstract

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 our 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 are 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.

Miskioglu, E. (2018, June), It Takes All Kinds: Incorporating Diversity Education in the Engineering Classroom Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--30739

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