2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background: As accreditation bodies globally become more specific about faculty responsibility concerning creating inclusive environments, faculty need to understand and be supported in their efforts to transform the landscape of educator approaches in engineering education. Soon, faculty must, “…demonstrate knowledge of appropriate institutional policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and demonstrate awareness appropriate to providing an equitable and inclusive environment for its students that respects the institution’s mission.” [1, pg. 51]. This is likely due to the fact that while undergraduate graduation rates for women and historically marginalized students in engineering programs in the US have improved from 2008 to 2018, the total degrees awarded to students of color and women are still far below population representation [2]. Research has shown that students from underserved groups are more likely to persist when they see the link between their coursework and improving society. At the same time, human welfare components are becoming a part of accreditation protocols [3], [1]. These two factors, retention and accreditation compliance, create an opportunity for improvement in engineering education that has the potential to simultaneously address both. We believe the seeds of this improvement strategy may already be in use and examine through a linguistic and cultural lens the rhetorical strategies instructional faculty use to communicate technical concepts to students with the hope that we can increase utilization of these strategies to benefit students and simplify recommendations for instructional faculty who are striving to be compliant with ABET and other accreditation bodies and manage their workload within realistic constraints put on educational institutions.
Purpose: We believe that by explicitly articulating the applications of coursework to society, learning objectives to social service, and faculty commitment to advocacy for equitable practices in engineering education and practice we can lay a foundation for a learning space that effectively supports engagement and a sense of belonging among our students. There are a myriad of ways faculty approach engaging students in technical classrooms. We identify three teaching strategies that incorporate social impacts in technical courses. In this paper we identify and examine the characteristics of discourse and rhetorical strategies and how emphasizing inclusive and equitable delivery may impact student perception of technical courses and their position as learners.
Method: Instructional delivery in engineering education spaces is varied and deeply contextualized. Because we believe the specific terms and the tone used to introduce key disciplinary concepts creates a setting that can support student success and foster growth-mindsets over time, we conduct an inventory of language use practices of instructional faculty in order to understand how these practices, which are already being used by faculty, can be intentionally applied on a larger scale to better support all students and help faculty communicate their efforts to administrative and regulatory bodies. To enrich our understanding, we conducted field observations and interviewed instructors of courses in which these inclusive language practices are applied and result in the instantaneous integration of social impacts and technical coursework in engineering education. Social impacts in this context are defined as the environmental, economic, policy, socio-cultural, public welfare, and human/technology interaction areas that practicing engineers need to be aware of, and competent in, to create solutions that take into consideration structural conditions, reduce risks and minimize harm to underserved communities, and enhance human capability [4], [5]. We then analyzed these notes and instructor responses using a linguistic and cultural lens and framework of student success supported by awareness of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Results: Preliminary results show that faculty are already incorporating social impacts into engineering education through discourse and rhetorical strategies used in lectures and course discussion through three fundamental methods: modeling the limitations of their own personal expertise, positioning humans as more important than technology, and application exploration/storytelling.
Conclusion: Through the use of examples, personal interactions, and application or classroom context-based anecdotes, faculty are already creating authentic microcosms of inclusive classrooms and are struggling to articulate how they do it to administrators and ABET. We suggest these resultant methods be used to create microinsertions of ethics and social impacts as one strategy for minimizing the technical/social dualism present in most curriculum [6], [7] which we hope will prove a rigorous strategy for the eventual full integration of sociotechnical approaches to problem solving in engineering education.