NSF Award
2308532
This NSF Track 4 Broadening Participation in Engineering (BPE) project aims to catalyze a culture change in the education of the next generation of engineers. The Developing Equity-Minded Engineering Practitioners (DEEP) Center will engage reflective and proactive practitioners toward creating cultural, structural, and pedagogical changes across the engineering discipline and beyond. The strategy for systemic change is to educate, equip, engage, and empower instructional faculty, with effective research-based practices for inclusive, equitable, and transparent learning. The DEEP Center will create a central, visible hub for professional development, organizational learning, and collaboration through communities of practice across the educational ecosystem of faculty and instructors. The DEEP Center will positively impact the retention and success of students, particularly those from racial and ethnic backgrounds that are historically underrepresented in engineering. DEEP focuses on fixing the system rather than fixing the student. In so doing, DEEP will strengthen the future U.S. Engineering workforce with the knowledge, beliefs, and practices of inclusive excellence so that they can research, develop, and innovate the best solutions for 21st century global challenges.<br/><br/>The DEEP Center will be led by the Institute for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA) in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in collaboration with Mitchell School of Engineering at Morgan State University (MSU). The goal of this center is to develop faculty change agents at UIUC and MSU who will foster equitable and inclusive teaching and learning environments for students The project objectives are to: (1) co-develop, co- pilot, and collect a repository of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) instructional examples for faculty to adapt and infuse in their own curricula; (2) collaborate in equity-minded communities of practice; (3) implement an effective analytical framework for assessing and integrating inclusive STEM teaching and learning, and (4) articulate, evaluate, and share a model for collaboration between Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) and predominantly white institutions (PWIs) around increasing the infusion of DEI into undergraduate engineering education that includes faculty exchange and co-teaching of courses. The guiding research questions are focused on understanding the impact of the DEEP model (peer-facilitated professional development and equity-minded communities of practice) to lead to changes in the knowledge, attitude, behaviors, and effectiveness (KABE) of teaching personnel. The evaluation will use a mixed methods approach to gain a comprehensive, in-depth understanding of the project. Appropriate evaluation instruments will be used to assess changes in DEEP participants’ KABE in fostering equitable and inclusive engineering learning environments. Data collection activities will include a review of instructor and course evaluation system data from participating teaching personnel, interviews with teaching personnel, focus groups with students to gauge experiences and impacts, observations of in-person professional development and teaching personnel classes, and surveys assessing perceived quality of DEEP implementation and outcomes. Project outcomes will include the creation of a repository of DEI lesson examples to be shared publicly, a guidebook on forming an HBCU/MSI-PWI partnership and sharing lessons learned, workshops for colleagues at UIUC and MSU, and virtual webinars to the broader engineering education community. Because of our focus on systemic change, we plan to share project outcomes with engineering administration, institutional leadership at MSU and UIUC, and nationally. The success of this project will bridge the gaps between top-down policy reforms requiring DEI contributions and bottom-up faculty efforts across multiple institutions to develop and execute equitable and inclusive teaching practices.<br/><br/>This project is co-funded by the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP), which provides awards to strengthen STEM undergraduate education and research at HBCUs. This project is also co-funded by NSF’s Eddie Bernice Johnson Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (INCLUDES) Initiative, which seeks to motivate and accelerate collaborative infrastructure building to advance and sustain systemic change to broaden participation in STEM at scale.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
