2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Evidence-based Practice Paper
After 15 years of conflict, Iraqi higher education institutions are crucial to the country’s efforts to rebuild and unify. Engineering in particular is an important discipline for the individual and socio-economic development of skilled workers needed to restore and rebuild national infrastructure. Engineering faculty enabled with the tools and skills to productively teach, learn, and research can mentor graduates with the technical and professional skills needed to support the country’s economic growth. In 2019, the US Department of State funded a project to invest in the Liberated Universities of Iraq. One of the focus areas of this project was the professional development of each University’s engineering educators because of its affordances for sustainable economic growth. Subsequently, [redacted] University, [redacted organization], and an Iraqi University conducted a joint needs assessment to identify the specific areas of interest for the engineering faculty members. A population survey was conducted with all 161 faculty members of the College of Engineering. The needs assessment identified student-centered learning, blended learning, and culturally relevant pedagogy as the faculty members’ core pedagogical areas of interest. These needs were identified in a conscious attempt to navigate the disruption to normal day-to-day classroom practices caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings were further used to design and facilitate a virtual 7-session three-month faculty development workshop. Our research team was interested in the cultural lens of engineering education in this context. Our research questions were as follows: what does culturally relevant engineering education look like in the context of Iraq? How do engineering faculty members who participated in a focused professional development workshop provide culturally relevant support to their students? We recruited 19 workshop participants, and 9 consented to participate in this study. Our data consist of semi-structured interviews, reflection journals, and survey questions developed to investigate the three criteria (academic achievement, cultural competence, and critical consciousness) suggested by Gloria Ladson Billings in her theory for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. Using content analysis, we coded the data and categorized the three criteria. Our analysis showed that of all three, participants in this specific context leaned more toward cultural competence. This was evidenced by their frequent use of Arabic language code-switching to navigate the difficulty of explaining technical engineering jargon to their students. Additionally, most of the participants reported frequent cases of using contextual analogies in their engineering classes. This paper further nuances the tripartite criteria of culturally relevant pedagogy, illuminating through the voices of participants in this context, a different way to understand what culturally relevant pedagogy looks like in racially homogenous yet ethnically heterogeneous cultural contexts.