2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

This research paper contributes to the field's understanding on how to support educators in creating a diverse and inclusive engineering education environment. Even with many conversations around diversity and inclusion, recruitment and retention of underrepresented students continues to be a concern. Although much has been learned, it is difficult to put into practice the research backed methods to improve the diversity and inclusion of our teaching. Our work looks at the lived experiences of university level engineering educators who have been incorporating diverse and inclusive practices in their teaching. Through highlighting lived experiences, this work seeks to provide insights into the realities and difficulties of incorporating inclusive practices into one’s teaching. We used an open-ended interview protocol and conducted a thematic analysis on the transcribed data. We report the range of practices participants discussed, in order to give context to some of the lived experiences. We share realities around three themes: Community Support, Learning from Experiences, and The Work is Hard. Despite the amount of research on diversity and inclusion in the context of engineering education, we recognize incorporating these practices in teaching brings its own set of challenges. Therefore, we must not only understand what diversity and inclusion means, but also the context educators are working in and how they are experiencing this work of incorporating diverse and inclusive practices.