2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Having suitable provisions in place to support equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) has become increasingly important throughout higher education. In our chemical engineering department, we are currently exploring strategies that would actively enhance and promote EDI whilst aligning the provisions to the curriculum. In this paper, we discuss some of the work we have been doing in partnership with our student body on developing sustainable practices – that builds on earlier work which focused on defining and identifying EDI practices. We have identified 5 key areas of particular interest to us: improvements to our student-to-student peer review system, a departmental charter for staff and students, constructive changes to the programme handbook, a resource developed by students for students, and changes to the content and delivery of certain modules that could accommodate EDI, or the identification of modules/courses that do. As part of the research/verification process, a limited amount of survey data was collected from students to help us establish underlying issues and how suggested sustainable changes might be perceived. In conducting this work, certain challenges have arisen as well as opportunities.