WIP: Integration of Inclusive Mindset in a Middle-Year Biomedical Engineering Course: a Study Over Healthcare Disparities via Story-Driven Learning

There is a recognized need for increased diversity and inclusion in engineering education and in the engineering workforce. One approach to address this need is to provide students with frequent learning opportunities to practice adopting an inclusive mindset in their interpersonal interactions as well as in their engineering analytical problem-solving and design practices. This manuscript illustrates how we are infusing these learning activities in our major-required analytically focused courses. We describe a work in progress intervention in a major-required second-year analytically-focused biomedical engineering course called "Conservation Principles in Biomedical Engineering". This course is taught using the problem-solving studio (PSS) approach, developed by our department in 2008, which is a highly interactive apprenticeship learning environment in which students work in a stable team of four for the entire semester. In this intervention, students are challenged to consider bias in engineering design and its impacts on others through a semester-long project composed of a series of individual and team exercises. This intervention is designed to raise students' awareness of bias in biomedical engineering designs and processes and the impacts they have on them and on others.