2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Finding tangible ways to incorporate inclusion into classroom environments remains a daunting task for many educators. The engineering education literature provides examples of activities to try and practices to incorporate, but applying the literature in a manner appropriately nuanced to an educator’s specific situated context takes time and effort. There are also many unknown factors educators cannot prepare for. In this narrative study, we present the story of an instructor who takes incremental steps to build an inclusive environment in a senior capstone course in order to promote her student’s understanding of the importance of having an inclusive environment. This paper highlights how one new tool, the Inclusivity Meter (IM), produces insights for the department as it continues its Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) grant. Despite various changes incorporated in the senior design and the department as a whole, students continued to bring up feelings of exclusion in departmental and college wide surveys, which warranted further attention. This study documents one quarter, Fall of 2020, as the school continues with virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The tool, the “Inclusivity Meter,” is a weekly reflection activity that asks students to answer two questions: “How included did you feel?” and “Are there any additional comments you would like to add?”. Each senior design team was required to formulate team norms and a team agreement to scaffold the conversations of inclusion. The instructor herself then reflected on these weekly enactments of the tool and becomes more aware of inclusion in her classroom and what conversations seem to bubble up around the Inclusivity Meter.She also reflects on how this practice communicates to her students her commitment to inclusion and how it has helped her encourage students to speak up about issues around inclusion. Here, we monitor this practice through a series of reflective conversations between the educator and the other two authors and present a narrative based on themes from these conversations. This study provides new engineering educators an insight into what it looks like to incorporate a specific inclusive practice, how we might start thinking differently about what works and for whom in enacting inclusive practices, and how educators can continue to develop their “integrity of practice” around inclusion.