Race, Justice and Engineering Design - a pilot freshman engineering course

Abstract The purpose of this practices paper is to share the process, experiences, and outcomes of redesigning a course for first-year engineering students to incorporate the concepts of race and social justice, and how they are critical in engineering design. The course is being offered as a pilot section that will eventually be provided to all first-year engineering students across all sections of the Intro to Engineering Design course. In this course, the main learning goals have traditionally been to have students understand the engineering design process at a basic level and understand what good teamwork is within the context of engineering design. The re-designed course keeps these goals, but also introduces the need to see, define, and communicate differences in your design and your team. To be an effective engineer, we believe you must fundamentally understand the difference between you and the customer/community you are designing for, as well as the team you are working with. In this pilot offering of the course, we introduce the concepts of race as constructed, race as intersectional, and race as global with videos interviewing experts in these fields, created by our own Communications Department faculty. The students are challenged to incorporate these concepts into their teamwork, as well as to the engineering design process. Students discuss the realities of racism with engineering examples such as environmental racism, STEM educational desserts, and bias in coding. The students are given examples and case studies to work through and participate in nine facilitated dialogue experiences to learn to effectively communicate across difference. The facilitators are trained dialogue experts and run these sessions in smaller cohorts to build trust in the dialogue group. The designers of this course believe that implementing this in the freshman year will establish that all engineers at our university are expected to put the community first in their designs, as well as be actively anti-racist in their work. The paper will include data comparing the learning outcomes of the students in the pilot course to those in the traditional introductory engineering course. Data will be collected at the start and end of the semester and will measure students' perceived knowledge of the engineering design process, perceived ability to work effectively in a team setting, perceived understanding of social justice in the context of engineering design, and comfort level in discussing social justice issues.