You’ve heard the saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”?

Well, the National Science Foundation believes the educational system in engineering schools needs fixing. And it’s calling on the help of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to do so.

What’s broken? It’s in the numbers.

According to a report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, of the nearly 1.7 million prime-age engineering workers in the United States in 2019, 81% were White, Asian, or Asian American. Eighty-four percent were men. Only 3% were Black or Latinx women.

Engineering is a problem-solving field. It provides solutions that society benefits from, in manufacturing, energy, technology, transportation, communication, medicine and on and on.

That’s what makes diversity in the field so critical. The best solutions come from collaborations that spawn creative and innovative ideas derived collectively from an array of perspectives.

If the vast majority of a workforce thinks alike, that’s a problem.

DEEP Thinking in Engineering Education

A project undertaken by faculty at the U. of I. and Morgan State University aims to catalyze a culture change in the education of the next generation of engineers—and in the process, recruit, retain, and graduate higher numbers of students from racial and ethnic backgrounds that are historically underrepresented in engineering.

Developing Equity-Minded Engineering Practitioners (DEEP) is designed to educate, equip, and empower faculty with research-based practices for inclusive, equitable, and transparent learning.

To do so, the DEEP Center team is creating a hub for professional development, organizational learning, and collaboration through “communities of practice” across the educational ecosystem.

The entire focus is on improving undergraduate, non-laboratory courses in engineering.

"Fixing the System"

“We’re fixing the system rather than fixing the student,” says Jennifer Cromley, professor in the College of Education’s Educational Psychology Department and co-principal investigator for the two-year project. “By that, I mean if students aren’t seeing how what they are learning connects with anything in their own communities, with anything that improves the world, it’s up to the faculty to make those connections.”

Cherie Avent, assistant professor in Educational Psychology and lead evaluator for the project, says the center’s events and resources are helping faculty “recognize that they are key agents in changing the system.”

In addition, she says, the project is about “recognizing that universities don’t have to work in silos. Here, we’re bringing two institutions together who have been successful in recruiting, retaining, and graduating engineers, two institutions who have different contexts and missions but are coming together to learn from one another in order for students to be successful in STEM.”

Cromley and Avent are teaming with faculty from the Grainger College of Engineering, including Dean Rashid Bashir and co-principal investigators Ellen Wang Althaus, Lynford Goddard, and Ashleigh Wright. The Illinois team is collaborating with faculty from Morgan State, a historically Black research university in Baltimore, Maryland, including principal investigator Onyema Osuagwu and co-PIs Dean Oscar Barton and Cliston Cole from the Mitchell School of Engineering. Osuagwu and Cole received their Ph.D.s from Illinois.

Simple but Effective Strategies

The project is about halfway through its two-year grant life. Four workshops were held for engineering faculty from both schools this past spring, led alternately by faculty from both universities.

The workshops, Avent says, provided refreshers for faculty who noted they had been thinking about the workshops topics and also offered strategies to implement changes in teaching design.

“The strategies aren’t labor intensive,” she says. “They foster building a classroom where students will want to engage and will feel a part of the environment, feel included in the learning.”

Cromley says some of the strategies are as simple as giving students choices and letting them propose their own projects. “Doing so helps them connect with challenges in their community,” she says.

Cromley references the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore County, Maryland, which collapsed last spring after being struck by a ship. “Baltimoreans who used that bridge to get to work are collectively losing $2 million a day,” she says. “So, maybe your project is to design a new bridge. And in this plan, you consult with people who are affected by the bridge’s collapse.”

Many of the ideas coming from the workshop are relatively easy to implement, Cromley notes. “I’ve made some changes to my own teaching materials because of the workshops, and I thought, ‘Wow, that was easy!’” she says.

Communities of Practice

Feedback from workshop participants about what they wanted to explore further led to “communities of practice” gatherings.

“This past summer we had communities of practice around transparency of teaching, one on reflective teaching that is still ongoing, and one on inclusive teaching,” Avent says.

Inclusivity, she adds, is not restricted to people. “One of the challenges is thinking about are the environments inclusive,” she says. “Can students see not only themselves in the material, but can they begin thinking about what does this mean for my community beyond the classroom?”

Communities of practice are where the rubber meets the road.

“They’re comprised of a group of faculty who are committed to change something in their teaching design,” Cromley explains. “That could be changing your assignments to make it more evident to students how to succeed on the assignment, or it could be reflecting, in writing, on your own teaching and designing certain changes into how you teach, and then implementing those changes in the subsequent semester. People run ideas by each other. There’s a lot of trust built among the faculty who are engaged in this common endeavor.”

As part of her evaluation process, Avent will be interviewing the faculty about the changes they are making as a result of participating in a community of practice. She and her graduate research assistant are also collecting data from the workshops to help improve future offerings.

“We want to see how they plan to implement changes in their classroom,” she says.

The DEEP Center also has a repository where ideas, resources, and lesson plans are stored. “The intent is to share it broadly with other faculty in undergraduate engineering across the country,” Avent says.

Making a Broad Impact

“I’d love to see us develop a model that people across the country can use,” Cromley says. “We’re really just at the beginning of this work, but we’ve already developed a classroom observation instrument, a user manual and technical report.” Among other things, the instrument helps identify DEI-fostering or -hindering instructional behavior in undergraduate engineering courses, tracks changes over time for faculty in their DEI-fostering or -hindering instructional behavior, and identifies differences in patterns of instructional behavior between groups (e.g., males and females) to provided more targeted supports or proactive change initiatives.

It’s possible, Cromley says, that what the DEEP Center is developing for undergraduate engineering education could translate to other disciplines as well.

“The NSF is always looking for a broader impact,” she says. “Somebody else could pick up on this and try it in biology or education or in some other discipline. While the tax dollars in our case fund engineering education, good things could develop and spread to other endeavors.”

The immediate goal of the DEEP Center, though, is to develop faculty change agents at Illinois and Morgan State University.

“We’re helping faculty foster a more equitable and inclusive teaching and learning environment for students,” Cromley says. “And in the end, that will result in a more creative, productive engineering workforce.”