Work in Progress (Research Category): Exploring Strategies for Infusing DEI Principles Into Undergraduate Engineering Classrooms for Engineering School and Institutional Change

21st-century technologies for global communication, e.g., smartphones, live streaming, and social media, have made access to observing and empathizing with the struggles and experiences of “others - not like me” in the United States ubiquitous. These historical realities have also motivated a resurgence of interest and studies aimed at understanding the meager growth in enrollment and graduation rates of racially diverse populations of students in the engineering field, which continues to plague educators and institutes of higher education. Organizations, such as ABET and the National Academies of Engineering, have established recommendations regarding mechanisms for the diversification of engineering and engineering technology communities (faculty, students, and staff), education and training of key stakeholders within these communities, and cohesive policies for the eradication of hidden curriculum and establishment of infrastructural change to facilitate inclusive environments, spaces, and pedagogy. As institutions work to follow these recommendations via the establishment of DEI committees, policies, and metrics for progress assessment, the need to understand how to infuse these DEI concepts into traditional engineering classrooms for student education remains an area of profound interest, especially considering the prior knowledge of 21st-century students, who have gained a lot of prior knowledge of DEI topics via external media versus traditional classroom environments. A careful and thoughtful exploration of our campus community (faculty, students, staff, alumni, and key stakeholders) is needed to understand better the state of knowledge and how this state connects to the individual's and community's implicit biases, personal social identity, inequity in access, microaggressions, and personal self-awareness of one's positionality within the larger whole. Crafting transformative DEI learning modules, realistic engineering-specific DEI pedagogy, and social justice engineering curriculum requires listening to student voices to understand their unique technical and historical context as an informed, and outspoken generation. This embedded parallel mixed-method work-in-progress study focuses on understanding the mechanisms for infusing DEI principles within higher education engineering curriculum via one research question, “How do undergraduate engineering students relate their personal engineering experiences to their social identity?” This work-in-progress study leverages two theoretical frameworks, Engineering Role Identity and Social Role Identity, to elucidate how to pragmatically infuse DEI principles and modules within an engineering curriculum. Preliminary findings suggest that 21st-century engineering students who have experienced the COVID pandemic and media exposure to violence against unarmed people of color are aware of terms typically covered in the majority of Introduction to Diversity Training courses. This prior knowledge uniquely positions them to understand more advanced DEI principles relating to microaggressions in teamwork environments and implicit biases that negatively infiltrate the engineering design process.