Cargando…

Educating Engineering Students to Address Bias and Discrimination Within Their Project Teams

What training should engineering students receive to enable them to contribute to reducing bias, discrimination and the persistent lack of diversity in engineering? Collaboration is central to professional engineering work and, consequently, teamwork and group projects are increasingly present in en...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Isaac, Siara, Kotluk, Nihat, Tormey, Roland
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Netherlands 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9903283/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36749523
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11948-022-00426-w
_version_ 1784883442753732608
author Isaac, Siara
Kotluk, Nihat
Tormey, Roland
author_facet Isaac, Siara
Kotluk, Nihat
Tormey, Roland
author_sort Isaac, Siara
collection PubMed
description What training should engineering students receive to enable them to contribute to reducing bias, discrimination and the persistent lack of diversity in engineering? Collaboration is central to professional engineering work and, consequently, teamwork and group projects are increasingly present in engineering curricula. However, the influence of unconscious bias on interactions within teams can negatively affect women and underrepresented groups and is now recognised as an important engineering ethics issue. This paper describes a workshop designed to enable engineering students to work equitably in diverse teams. Key features of the workshop include (1) the emotionally safe, empowering and warm environment created, (2) the creation of opportunities for students to discuss and apply the issues raised to their own engineering projects, and (3) the opportunities to practice the use of both proactive and reactive strategies to address bias and discrimination in teams. The evaluation of the workshop suggests that engineering students regarded both onsite and online formats as providing useful skills that they intended to apply in practice. Follow-up evaluations suggest that the workshop leads to behavioural change, especially the use of proactive teamwork strategies intended to reduce the impact of unconscious bias. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11948-022-00426-w.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-9903283
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2023
publisher Springer Netherlands
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-99032832023-02-07 Educating Engineering Students to Address Bias and Discrimination Within Their Project Teams Isaac, Siara Kotluk, Nihat Tormey, Roland Sci Eng Ethics Original Research/scholarship What training should engineering students receive to enable them to contribute to reducing bias, discrimination and the persistent lack of diversity in engineering? Collaboration is central to professional engineering work and, consequently, teamwork and group projects are increasingly present in engineering curricula. However, the influence of unconscious bias on interactions within teams can negatively affect women and underrepresented groups and is now recognised as an important engineering ethics issue. This paper describes a workshop designed to enable engineering students to work equitably in diverse teams. Key features of the workshop include (1) the emotionally safe, empowering and warm environment created, (2) the creation of opportunities for students to discuss and apply the issues raised to their own engineering projects, and (3) the opportunities to practice the use of both proactive and reactive strategies to address bias and discrimination in teams. The evaluation of the workshop suggests that engineering students regarded both onsite and online formats as providing useful skills that they intended to apply in practice. Follow-up evaluations suggest that the workshop leads to behavioural change, especially the use of proactive teamwork strategies intended to reduce the impact of unconscious bias. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11948-022-00426-w. Springer Netherlands 2023-02-07 2023 /pmc/articles/PMC9903283/ /pubmed/36749523 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11948-022-00426-w Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Original Research/scholarship
Isaac, Siara
Kotluk, Nihat
Tormey, Roland
Educating Engineering Students to Address Bias and Discrimination Within Their Project Teams
title Educating Engineering Students to Address Bias and Discrimination Within Their Project Teams
title_full Educating Engineering Students to Address Bias and Discrimination Within Their Project Teams
title_fullStr Educating Engineering Students to Address Bias and Discrimination Within Their Project Teams
title_full_unstemmed Educating Engineering Students to Address Bias and Discrimination Within Their Project Teams
title_short Educating Engineering Students to Address Bias and Discrimination Within Their Project Teams
title_sort educating engineering students to address bias and discrimination within their project teams
topic Original Research/scholarship
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9903283/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36749523
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11948-022-00426-w
work_keys_str_mv AT isaacsiara educatingengineeringstudentstoaddressbiasanddiscriminationwithintheirprojectteams
AT kotluknihat educatingengineeringstudentstoaddressbiasanddiscriminationwithintheirprojectteams
AT tormeyroland educatingengineeringstudentstoaddressbiasanddiscriminationwithintheirprojectteams