Congratulations to College of Education faculty Jennifer Cromley, professor, Educational Psychology, and Cherie Avent, assistant professor, Educational Psychology, on receiving an $800K NSF Grant for a project titled Developing Equity-Minded Engineering Practitioners (DEEP). The project is being conducted with Rashid Bashir, PI, of the Grainger College of Engineering and Morgan State University. Cromley will serve as co-PI, and Avent will be the evaluator.
From the abstract:
The goal is to broaden participation by fostering equitable and inclusive teaching and learning environments. Drawing from a conceptional model of deep teaching for inclusive teaching Communities of Practice change framework and faculty change agents at UIUC and MSU, DEEP will develop reflective and proactive practitioners toward creating cultural change across the engineering discipline and beyond. The strategy of DEEP focuses on fixing the system rather than fixing the student. In so doing, DEEP will create sustained disciplinary impact that develops an equity-minded engineering workforce with the knowledge, beliefs, and practices of inclusive excellence to research, develop, and innovate the best solutions for 21st-century global challenges. The objectives of DEEP are to (1) co-develop, co-pilot, and collect a repository of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) instructional examples built around core principles for faculty to adapt and infuse in their curricula; (2) hold collaborative workshops for faculty to brainstorm and develop their instructional examples and build communities of practice for inclusive teaching practices; (3) implement an effective analytical framework for assessing and integrating inclusive STEM teaching and learning, and (4) articulate, evaluate, and share a model for collaboration between Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) and predominantly white institutions (PWIs) around increasing the infusion of DEI into undergraduate engineering education that includes faculty exchange and co-teaching of courses. The outcome of this project would bridge the gap between top-down policy reforms requiring DEI contributions and the execution of equitable and inclusive teaching through faculty development.
