Theatre in Engineering Classes: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Address Bias in Student Engineering Teams

This full paper describes an innovative approach to teaching professional skills in engineering classrooms using the medium of theatre. Professional skills are not frequently or explicitly taught in engineering classrooms, especially those that are addressing issues of bias or discrimination. We provide two examples of how our interdisciplinary team implemented in-person theatre scenes and virtual interactive theatre scenes to directly address gender discrimination and bias in engineering teams. In both settings, engineering students first watched student actors perform a scene of a highly dysfunctional team. Two trained facilitators then helped the student audience identify and address the dysfunction. In the in-person scenes, engineering students were invited to join the scene as an additional team member to try to redirect or to directly address the conflict as the actors replayed the scene. After the scene, the facilitators asked the rest of the students to identify what they liked about the approach. In the virtual performances (enacted due to COVID interruptions), the engineering students asked questions of the actors to understand and resolve the underlying issues. In both settings, the facilitators end by debriefing the activity with the engineering students. To adapt to the virtual setting, we modified the script so that the students were working as a team in a virtual setting (e.g., a zoom meeting) and added an additional facilitator role to manage the online platform. In both formats, the students attended, observed, participated, and brainstormed effective ways of collaborating and communicating with their peers. The online version has been easier to implement and is able to host more students. Thus, we have continued to use this format even though classes are now fully in-person. In this paper, we walk through the roles of each of our interdisciplinary team leads, the nature of the facilitator training, and the details of implementing this training. Further, we describe the evolution from conception to institutionalization of these efforts into the first-year engineering experience. Finally, the interdisciplinary team from the participating universities share lessons learned and practical tips on how to initiate similar efforts at other universities.