Are you interested in emerging and promising evidence-based practices in education aimed at supporting the persistence and success of diverse students?

Do you find it time-consuming to distill the research, let alone translate the research to practice?

Well, the Engineering Inclusive Teaching (EIT): Faculty Professional Development Project can help!

Although this work was designed for higher education engineering faculty, we welcome all who are interested. The research that is distilled and translated-to-practice in our webinars is applicable to most educational environments!

Whether it be about 7 research-based principles for smart teaching, engineering self-efficacy and professional vision, reducing unintended bias, uncivil behavior and/or mitigating social judgement, EIT webinars and resources can help you engineer inclusive education environments.

We’d love your thoughts!

This seems like a very important initiative and I bet your webinars are very informative. Can you share a few key strategies to make the culture more supportive of women and more successful in retaining them? You may be interested in connecting to the presenters on a very similar theme. See
http://videohall.com/p/670 They run workshops on this. May be interesting to compare notes.

Thanks Joni!
We started our work with a webinar on How Learning Works—7 Research Based Principles for Smart Teaching with Dr. Susan Ambrose, one of the authors of the book with the same name as the webinar. We recognized, and the irony is not lost on us, that most faculty are not specifically trained to teach and so we built our webinar professional development platform from there!

Subsequent topics for creating an inclusive culture included:
—Engineering Self-Efficacy;
—Thriving Vs Surviving: A 4-Stage Model for Promoting Gender Equity;
—The Power of Personal Vision;
—Counteracting Stereotype Threat;
—Active Learning: Live and On-line;
—STEMming the Confidence Gap: Mitigating Social Judgement
—Creating a Positive Climate for Learning: Dealing with Incivility and Conflict in the Classroom;
—Recognizing and Addressing Unintended Bias in Engineering Education

We just completed a jointly co-sponsored webinar with ENGAGE Engineering on:
—Spatial Visualization: A Promising Intervention for Promoting Student Equity

Each of these webinars would be valuable for STEM educators from elementary through university contexts.

Thanks for your comment and suggestion. I will follow up!

This looks like a much needed program.

What is your opinion on the impact mentorship programs might have for facilitating a supportive environment?
Is this a non-profit initiative? Is it member based or open to the public?

Hi Araina!
Thanks for your comment and questions!
Mentoring means different things to different people and yes, I think that mentoring can serve a variety of beneficial purposes for both students and faculty. Mentoring can build self-efficacy, enhance professional identity, and help mitigate barriers of isolation and marginalization.

The is an NSF funded project to a non-profit program called the Women in Engineering ProActive Network. Our program, in and of itself, is worth checking out. We have a valuable Women in STEM Knowledge Center with loads of valuable research documents, as well as other professional development webinars.

The EIT project is open to the public. The WEPAN organizational resources are a mix of member-only and public.

There is definitely a need for such programs but I am concerned about the incentives, or lack of incentives, for faculty to participate in webinars and implement the strategies recommended. Do you have examples of programs that have used the info provided by WEPAN to change culture and outcomes in their undergrad engineering programs?

Love how explicitly you spell out the goal of your project and metrics achieved thus far! It helps make the content accessible to a broad audience. Will you have any data collection in the future regarding student outcomes (specifically, women and underrepresented male students)?

Thanks for contributing to this important work! In my current work designing engineering curriculum for middle school students, I finally realized I probably would have loved to pursue a career in engineering, but it was never presented to me as an option. We work very hard to include examples of diverse engineers in our units so that future generations will more likely “see” themselves in careers in engineering. I notice your video makes a significant effort to show a truly diverse population. What else have you learned about increasing and retaining diversity in the engineering fields?

That’s a lot of downloads! How you you advertised the webinars? Do you partner with universities? How would you recommend teachers implement the strategies they learn from the webinars?

Thank you for the great information about your project and all of the strategies for implementing it. You noted self-efficacy strategies that include providing diverse examples of engineers. We know that role modeling and mentoring can take many forms. Have you considered or used media in any of your efforts to encourage young women to persist in engineering? We have recently done a series of short films about women in non-traditional careers (many are young professional engineers) and have taken an explicit approach to the short conversations/profiles. Thank you!
http://www.tpt.org/scigirls-profiles/

This is an important initiative and it seems to be working!
Gretal, you mention above that “Each of these webinars would be valuable for STEM educators from elementary through university contexts.” Could you share your thinking about how these webinars would support K-12 teachers?

Hi, Gretal,
Thank you for such important work! Sandra Laursen and I have felt, over the years of our ADVANCE project on identifying strategies for fostering organizational change in support of more inclusive campuses, that your work is a parallel and highly important project. By providing such well-developed webinars that can be directly accessed by faculty, you are “right in the thick” of encouraging effective change strategies. I especially like the way in which all your work is embedded in research, and links the research to practical strategies.

I also wanted to tell you how much I like the design of your video. It is so engaging and attractive, it draws in the viewer because of the sense of energy it conveys, and it definitely offers a spirit of inclusiveness and respect for diversity. Great work?