(520b) A 52-Week, Scaffolded Faculty Initiative Focused on Engineering Culture, Climate, and Education

The faculty in chemical engineering at a predominantly white institution in the Midwest began a year-long journey in July 2022 to examine engineering culture and climate and their intersection primarily with engineering education. The goals of the project were to develop a department-wide learning process and to build a safe environment where faculty could consider and discuss challenging and thought-provoking content, have open dialogue, and build relational bonds. Discussions were aimed at bolstering our efforts toward building and nurturing a culture in which everyone is welcome, valued, respected, included, and supported. This work was facilitated by a faculty lead from the department that served as a Dean’s Fellow within the college to support these efforts throughout the year. The presentation of this work will provide an overview of the scaffolded approach with examples of each element and the author’s experiences in leading the initiative.

The scaffolded approach included three main elements: weekly challenges, guided workshops, and development of an action plan. Weekly challenge emails provide space for individual learning and reflection on a wide range of topics, including normalizing a culture of wellness, fostering a “weed in” culture, climate in the classroom, transparency in teaching, the power of words and stories, and student retention, persistence, and attrition. Hour-long guided workshops were run using the World Café method, where the power of conversation enables the group to share collective knowledge, question assumptions, and use our wisdom and creativity to confront difficult challenges in academia. Guided group discussions in the World Café workshops focused on examining relevant case studies, norms, and practices in engineering education. Small groups of faculty discussed ways we might be perpetuating the current culture and how we can interrupt or change our approaches to better support the success of all in our community. Faculty retreats focused on using the knowledge gained throughout the semester to develop an action plan to shape our future and make positive change happen. A DEI rubric developed by the PULSE network provided a framework for these discussions, enabling the group to baseline our current DEI efforts. Through this effort, the group identified areas of commonality where the department had already put in a lot of effort (the wins), areas where we need to collect data to support our observations or gain more information (questions or missing information), and key areas that we as a faculty wanted to dedicate time to (areas of improvement).