2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This complete experience-based practice paper describes a workshop series on inclusive teaching and design practices for undergraduate engineering teaching assistants of a cornerstone design course taught at a large private university. Undergraduate teaching assistants are integral to student success in the course. As the first points of contact for students, they assist with content delivery, guide students through hands-on labs and projects, and deliver feedback on assignments. Effective undergraduate teaching assistants are peer leaders and mentors to first-year students; through these workshops, we seek to ground their leadership and mentorship approaches in principles of global inclusion, diversity, belonging, equity, and access (GIDBEA).

In this work, we outline the workshop curriculum. Scaffolded into three parts, the workshop is designed to provide the teaching assistants with the ability to recognize and confront bias among individuals and within teams, help them develop an understanding of power, privilege, and oppression, and equip them with the tools to employ their knowledge as engineers through discussions of inclusive design. Co-created and co-facilitated by faculty, teaching assistants, and diversity, equity, and inclusion experts at the institution, the workshops feature short lectures by the facilitators, individual reflection activities, and small group discussions, culminating in a community-wide discussion on lessons learned and actionable items to build an inclusive community within our program.We seek to build our teaching assistants’ sense of agency in the classroom by cultivating a positive self-concept, developing their understanding of sociopolitical environments, and providing resources for action.

To understand the value that this training provides the teaching assistants, a survey was conducted of participants before and after participation in the workshops. The goal of this study is to inform plans for implementing solutions into training that address deficiencies identified through the survey and provide a set of inclusion best practices and learning objectives for inclusivity training for undergraduate teaching assistants. In this paper, findings from the third year of piloting our workshops are described. The data shows that all teaching assistants overall found that the workshop content and activities were relevant to them as peer educators. Several teaching assistants shared inclusive leadership strategies that they planned to implement in the coming semester.