2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Resetting the Default: Welcoming New Engineering Faculty to Inclusive Teaching

This work-in-progress paper explores how faculty professional development can support inclusive teaching, recognizing the classroom as a terrain of struggle and site of possibility. There have been numerous calls to increase the number of engineers in the United States. A prominent strategy to answer this call is broadening participation, which can be achieved, in part, by promoting practices of inclusive teaching. But at many engineering schools, faculty are hired primarily for their technical expertise rather than their educational expertise. This is not to say that engineering faculty do not care about broadening participation, quite the contrary, in our experience, most engineering faculty do indeed care about student success. This paper reports findings from a group of engineering faculty, students, and staff who gathered in September 2024 as part of a national society meeting discussing engineering education to brainstorm approaches for professional development following a process that was informed by the theory of nudging. One key strategy from nudging is to reset the default. In business, for example, a nudge to increase retirement plan participation is to make the plans opt-out instead of opt-in. Here, in the context of engineering education, the group brainstormed strategies to nudge new faculty toward inclusive teaching. This work was based on three premises. The first premise is that departments are good places to focus educational reform. The second premise is that resetting the default is easier for new faculty than for experienced faculty. The third premise is that context matters, that is, what may work at one engineering school may not work at another. Accordingly, the recommendations focus on process rather than product, since there is no one product (i.e., nudging approach) likely to work at all engineering schools. Instead, this paper aims to help the faculty at other engineering schools to apply this process, or a similar process, to welcome their own new faculty colleagues to inclusive teaching.

Authors

Prof. David C. Mays http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5218-1670 University of Colorado Denver [biography]

David Mays is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Colorado Denver. He earned his B.S. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995, then taught high school through Teach for America and worked as a contractor at Los Alamos National Laboratory before earning his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley in 1999 and 2005, respectively. He has been at CU Denver since 2005, where he teaches fluid mechanics and hydrology, studies flow in porous media using ideas from complex systems science, leads the graduate track in Hydrologic, Environmental, and Sustainability Engineering (HESE), and advocates for broadening participation in engineering. He is a registered professional engineer (PE) in California and Colorado.
Prof. Tom Altman [biography]

Tom Altman received his B.S. degrees in Computer Science and in Mathematics, and M.S. and Ph.D. (1984) in Computer Science, all from the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Altman specializes in optimization algorithms, formal language theory, and STEM education.
Dr. Maryam Darbeheshti http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7988-0906 University of Colorado Denver [biography]

Maryam Darbeheshti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado Denver. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Denver in 2009. She has been teaching at CU Denver since 2010. Darbeheshti's research interests are in the area of Fluid Mechanics and Engineering Education. She is the PI of a recent NSF award that focuses on STEM identity at Urban Universities.
Dr. Priscilla Hwang Virginia Commonwealth University [biography]

Priscilla Hwang an Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). She earned her BS, MS, and PhD from Duke University. While at Duke, she also received a Certificate in College Teaching. After her PhD, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St Louis. In 2019, she joined the faculty at VCU, where she teaches a freshman course, Introduction to Biological Systems in Engineering, and graduate level course in Microfluidics. She is also passionate about being an effective mentor and training the next generation of students in STEM.
Dr. Cassandra McCall http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-0240-432X Utah State University [biography]

Dr. Cassandra McCall is an Assistant Professor in the Engineering Education Department at Utah State University (USU). Her research focuses on the intersections of disability, identity formation, and culture and uses anti-ableist approaches to enhance universal access for students with disabilities in STEM, particularly in engineering. At USU, she serves as the Co-Director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Transition Services. In 2024, Dr. McCall received a National Science Foundation CAREER grant to identify systemic opportunities for increasing the participation of people with disabilities in engineering. Her award-winning publications have been recognized by leading engineering education research journals at both national and international levels. Dr. McCall has led several workshops promoting the inclusion of people with disabilities and other minoritized groups in STEM. She holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in civil engineering with a structural engineering emphasis.
Dr. Stephen Secules http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3149-2306 Florida International University [biography]

Dr. Stephen Secules is an Assistant Professor in the School of Universal Computing, Construction, and Engineering Education at Florida International University. Secules holds a joint appointment in the STEM Transformation Institute and a secondary appointment in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. He has bachelor degrees in engineering from Dartmouth College, a master’s in Architectural Acoustics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a PhD in Education (Curriculum and Instruction) from the University of Maryland. Prior to his academic career, Stephen was an acoustical consultant for 5 years in both London, UK and Silicon Valley, CA. His research has focused on culture and equity in engineering education, particularly undergraduate contexts, pedagogy, and student support. Through his work he aims to use critical qualitative, video-based, participatory, and ethnographic methods to look at everyday educational settings in engineering and shift them towards equity and inclusion. He also leads the Equity Research Group where he mentors graduate and undergraduate students in pursuing critical and action-oriented research.
Prof. Maribel Vazquez Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey [biography]

Dr. Vazquez is an inducted Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers (AIMBE) and Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) for the contributions of microfluidic systems in the visual system. She received the 2023 AIMBE Professional Impact Award for the inclusion of Health Disparities within under/graduate training and was honored as the 2024 Plenary Speaker to the BMES Council of Chairs for integration of health disparities in Biomedical Engineering curricula. She is an executive committee member for the Rutgers Connection Network that develops inclusive forms of peer mentoring for mid-career faculty as well as new faculty.
Kelsey Watts http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-4481-6303 University of Virginia [biography]

Kelsey Watts is a postdoc at the University of Virginia in Biomedical Engineering. She is committed to developing more inclusive teaching and research practices.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025