2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Building Awareness of Inclusivity through Scalable Hands-On Activities.

Presented at Committee on Educational Policy Presents: Holistic Program Topics

The importance of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) have become incorporated into the culture of engineering and ASEE has established a diversity recognition program to recognize Schools that have incorporated these aspects into their mission, a piece of which is the curricula. In addition, the revisions to ABET criterion 5 (curriculum) now includes the need to address DEI. To accomplish part of the curricular component, we have been working on hands-on activities that are scalable from a first-year program to upper level courses in engineering. The University is situated in a region that represents a very diverse community and the students in our engineering programs mirror this diversity. For example, the School boasts a 63.7% enrollment of Persons of Color. In addition, we do not have a separate admission to the School. The combination of our region and less restrictive entrance to the program results in a larger proportion of first-generation students with diverse academic backgrounds prior to entering the University. To aid students who experience academic challenges we have developed two activities that are introduced in the first-year curriculum and then revisited in an upper-level course. The idea is that this will create connections from the first-year courses to upper-level courses and give the students some familiarity with the topic. The activities will also address aspects of equity, accessibility, and inclusion. One activity addresses equity and water infrastructure through a water filtration activity. The second activity introduces the concepts of noise measurement and logarithmic calculations to bring awareness to hearing and the importance of OSHA standards in the workplace. This paper will measure the impact of the activities on building awareness of DEI and success in communicating the subject matter through Likert surveys of the students.

Authors

Dr. Margaret A. Hunter Hofstra University [biography]

Margaret Hunter,Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Engineering at Hofstra University in the Fred DeMatteir School of Engineering and Appplied Science. She has been teaching in the Civil Engineering program for 25 years. Her educational research focuses on broadening the participation in enigineering. This has included both formal and informal learning activites in pre-college, developing a course framework to aid faculty at 2 year institutions to encourage participation by women in STEM and currently involved in methods to improve retention in engineering.
Dr. Lynn A. Albers http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1436-0256 Hofstra University [biography]

Dr. Lynn Albers is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering of the Fred DeMatteis School of Engineering and Applied Science at Hofstra University. Her previous academic contribution was as one of the founding five faculty/staff at Campbell University, helping the newly formed School of Engineering grow and establish roots in the community. A proponent of Hands-On Activities in the classroom and during out-of-school time programs, she believes that they complement any teaching style thereby reaching all learning styles. She earned her doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from North Carolina State University specializing in thermal sciences where her dissertation research spanned three colleges and focused on Engineering Education. Her passions include but are not limited to Engineering Education, Energy Engineering and Conservation, and K-20 STEM Outreach. Prior to matriculating at NCSU, she worked at the North Carolina Solar Center developing a passion for wind and solar energy research while learning renewable energy policy. She combined these passions with K-20 STEM Outreach while a National Science Foundation Fellow with the GK-12 Outreach Program at NCSU where she began Energy Clubs, an out-of-school-time program for third, fourth and fifth graders to introduce them to renewable energy.
Salvador Rojas-Murillo Hofstra University

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