Designing for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Engineering Curricula

Abstract

The recent revived focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) education has prompted universities to reconsider how their undergraduate curriculum integrates DEI topics as a critical component of civic education and social engagement. This focus is significant within engineering education because it is becoming increasingly pressing for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields to recognize how the socio-technical aspects of their work are tied together. Recent engineering education literature has highlighted faculty’s important role in incorporating DEI content into the engineering curriculum (Garibay et al. 2020, Jiménez et al., 2019, Jiménez et al. 2020, Killpack and Melón 2016, Secules and Masta 2020). However, this problem has not been approached through a design research methodology. My research utilizes an integrative design methodology to understand how DEI education is created within undergraduate engineering classes at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. My research presents a card deck based on the Significant Learning Taxonomy (Fink, 2013) as a potential avenue for increasing the integration of DEI content into undergraduate engineering curricula.