Hello Rebecca,

As you know, I am already familiar with this important project. I look forward to following it. Keep up the exceptional work!!!   

Chris

Hi Chris! 

This is Karen- I'm also involved on the project. I just stopped by to check on our video comments and saw yours! Thanks for stopping by and for the kudos! 

Karen Rambo-Hernandez 

Hi Ann,

Thank you for the kind comments.

Very much looking forward to connecting with you and the Computing Alliance of HSIs!
(MSU Denver earned HSI status at the beginning of 2019.)

--Jody Paul

 

Hi Ximena,

The credit for the video goes to the media team at the University of Denver.

I enjoyed your video and loved the goals of your project.  I don't know much about early education, but I do wonder if there are lessons that go along with CT about how different people might think about problems in different ways and that different approaches are useful.  I know that young children are picking up messages about who is good at math and science early in their lives.

Hi Sara,

1. The idea for this project originated with a prior study where we were testing new group activities in a sophomore level undergraduate engineering course.  We recorded students working in teams with the intent of evaluating the assignment prompt.  When the videos were analyzed there were some cases where women students were marginalized in their teams. This was when I realized that no matter what kinds of resources we provide to students who are underrepresented in engineering they are still going to be working in classrooms with majority peers who may or may not recognize the impact of their words and actions. We need to engage with as many students as possible to change the climate in engineering.

2. Great question. We are collecting a variety of data to measure the impact of our activities including surveys in courses (before and after new activities are implemented), assessments of individual assignments, longitudinal surveys, and interviews with students.  Measuring changes of this nature is challenging, and as our campuses adopt new diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives it is hard to say which changes in student attitudes are directly related to our project.

That's great, Rebecca. Thank you for your responses!

Good to see such a varied range of metrics and data collection.  Since many of the skillsets associated with stem pursuits are useful across disciplines, is there a larger evaluative component for skills like computational thinking, scientific reasoning, spatial thinking, metacognitive evaluation, etc.?  that might enable your program to also demonstrate cross-disciplinary learning?  Thanks for sharing.

Travis,

Thanks for your comment! I certainly think seeing other URG represented in academia would encourage such students to at least consider academic careers. I also think just seeing faculty and other peers that see the value in diversity and encourage it in their instruction has a positive effect. I look forward to viewing your video!

Excellent messaging and partnership! Along these lines I might suggest checking out the following AAAS work: Sea Change (around sustainable change with regard to diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEMM at U.S. institutions of higher education), ERN Conference video in showcase (provides underrepresented undergraduate and graduate student STEM researchers a chance to present their research and find community), and AAAS IF/THEN Ambassadors (showing girls if you see it, you can be it).

Hi, Jennifer - Thanks for your kind words! We appreciate the resources you shared, particularly surrounding cultural transformations regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in higher education. An ongoing challenge is igniting and sustaining organizational change––independent of the specific individuals/roles who are championing DEI efforts––so that DEI efforts are animated at the departmental, collegiate, and institutional levels through a spectrum of mechanisms. At some of our institutions, for example, we are exploring how inclusive teaching practices and conducting research about scholarship of teaching and learning can count toward tenure and promotion. 

Hi Nancy,

Currently we are working mostly within individual disciplines.  The new curriculum activities we have been developing generally fall into one of three different categories:

1. Basic skills related to diversity and inclusion (for example, lessons about implicit bias)

2. Skills related to inclusive teamwork (e.g. having students reflect about their work in teams, learning about concepts such as psychological safety, appreciating different perspectives in problem solving)

3. Case studies about the impact of products or designs on different types of users (e.g. looking at seat-belts in dynamics, or social justice/environmental justice case studies)

No hay duda al respecto: tener un grupo de investigación diverso enriquece la experiencia de todos en mi laboratorio. A veces hemos contado cinco religiones, 4 lenguas maternas, múltiples tonos de piel, razas y géneros. No puedo decir que la ciencia que hacemos cambia debido a eso (a diferencia de los cinturones de seguridad en sus videos), pero ciertamente impacta nuestros proyectos de divulgación educativa y crea oportunidades para todos.

To add to Karen's comment, I would say a challenge is to make the activities appropriate for the specific course and not make it obvious it is a "diversity" type exercise. I think it is more beneficial to the students when a consequence of the particular exercise is the realization that different points of view helped make a better solution.

Lessons in biology? ecology?

Certainly, Orlando! We have some available here: http://partnership4equity.org/ in the resources tab. This will give you an idea of what we are doing. We have about 30 created, but we haven't formatted them all for posting on the website yet. I will check with the rest of the team to see which activities might be relevant for you and will attach them here. 

In general, we have categorized our activities into those that are course specific and those that could be dropped into any course. 

Thanks

Hi, James! We would welcome the opportunity to chat. Would you like to email us to schedule a mutually open date/time? Thanks so much! 

I'll allow my colleagues to add, but in my experience faculty are open to introducing exercises into their courses that incorporate diversity and inclusivity. Our approach is to engage with the faculty face to face as much as possible to discuss what our project is about and how it relates to their course. In many of the activities, we have one of our team help lead it during class. We want to limit any perceived burden as much as possible. In fact, once talking with faculty they often are excited about introducing these concepts in their class and seeing their students actively working together.

HI Keene,

I agree with Chris, many faculty are open to trying something and once they do one activity many faculty have been willing to try other things.  I think the biggest source of resistance is how busy faculty are.  Sometimes we have faculty agree to try something,but then it is a struggle to develop things in time.  One thing that has worked at CSU was to hire an undergrad research assistant to help a professor develop activities.  Having the undergrad not only helped with faculty time, but also helped us make sure the activity was right for the target audience.

Faculty in CS at MSU Denver have expressed universal support for the intent.  A concern is with the institutional environment in which onerous faculty workloads already interfere with basic review and updating of curriculum (outcomes, content, and delivery).  The challenge is finding a way of offering curricular change that lessens the already heavy burden on faculty in these kinds of environments.  Such changes, I believe, are very likely to be adopted posthaste.

Hi Bryce! 

We are looking at lots of different data sources- we are measuring student value of diversity in engineering/CS and their likelihood to enact inclusive behaviors (looking for increases in both relative to students who did not participate and comparing different groups of students), we are qualitatively analyzing their responses to the activties, and we are also using Social Cognitive Career Theory to assess their development into engineers or computer scientists- and looking to see if groups who had the interventions and those from diverse backgrounds develop in the same way (or are certain portions more salient in their development). 

Some of our indication of successes also looks at adoption and participation by faculty... our end goal for the activities is they just become part of the standard curriculum and not necessarily tied to the grant.  

I'd love to hear what types of outcomes you're using! We are always looking for different ways to capture the impact of the project! 

 

That does sound exciting. We've observed that finding ways to infuse leadership into the curriculum can be most effective, similar to what you are describing.

The outcome we're most focused on is a construct we proposed called engineering leadership identity, integrated from what we know about engineering identity and leadership identity. The project is a pure research project in that we engaged in a mixed methods study across existing datasets of college students and our own qualitative data collection following a grounded theory approach, but our next phase is working on programmatic/curricular interventions that would foster engineering leadership identity. The outcome I was referring to is a construct measured by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute that measures leadership self-efficacy which was built into the survey dataset we analyzed. But since we expect leadership self-efficacy may be an indicator or outcome of leadership identity, we assume interactions across difference help boost this particular aspect of identity as well.

I'll be interested to learn more about your development of inclusive engineering identity because it aligns well with the work I'm familiar with, and the bit I've been involved with, on engineering identity. The more ways we can show students how they can become engineers, the more broadly attractive the field will be in the service of broadening participation!

Thank you for your interest and comment about the importance of equity. I appreciate you sharing your video, your project sounds excellent as well!