Chemical engineering examples and homework are often theoretical, simplified, and lack societal context. Without context, engineers may design solutions that only serve the designers’ demographic. This unmarries the chemical engineering work from tangible real-world impacts. Without context, students aren’t given the opportunity to consider their design’s positive or negative impacts on diverse groups, specifically marginalized communities. By adding context into our classrooms we work to decenter western civilization, are sensitive to oppressions, and reflect on the role of identity in and outside of chemical engineering, and thereby encourage critical thinking through an equity lens (Donna Riley, “Engineering and Social Justice”, 2008). A low-cost, low barrier-to-entry method for faculty to include anti-racism, diversity, equity, inclusion (ARDEI), and social justice into their classrooms is by adding that context into homework, examples, or projects in courses at all levels. This enables students regularly to consider and internalize this content as critical to the discipline. Since most faculty are not trained in anti-racism work, we provide resources, review examples, and discuss the harms that may occur to marginalized students engaging with ARDEI and social justice work. We address the harm of allowing oppressive systems and inequities to go uninterrogated, sustaining biases, oppressive thoughts, and actions. We approach this work with ethical care, so that those holding marginalized identities are not subjected to further trauma. This workshop is designed to help you think through the process of including topics of ARDEI and social justice in your courses. Within this website we have put together a few resources, videos, examples, and activities that you can work through as you think about how to:
Connect technical work with issues of social justice
Create an inclusive and welcoming environment for discussion of these issues, and
Prevent the harm of students and teaching assistants who will be engaging with the work.
We originally hosted this for the faculty in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering (ChBE) at Northwestern University. The workshop was a great success! Faculty reported increased confidence in engaging with and developing questions on these topics, while students reported great benefits from engaging with these questions. You can read more about our research on the student and faculty experience in our Chemical Engineering Education publication, "Creating and implementing course content contextualized with anti-racism and social justice in chemical engineering: how faculty and students engaged in the process." We also presented this workshop at the 2022 ASEE/AIChE Chemical Engineering Summer School. Given the workshop’s success and benefits, we wanted to make these resources available for the larger community. Thus, we created this website to provide free access to the workshop materials to anyone interested.
A.N. Prybutok, A. Abegunde*, K.M. Sanroman Gutierrez*, L. Simitz*, C. Archuleta, & J. Cole. (2024). Creating and implementing course content contextualized with anti-racism and social justice in chemical engineering: how faculty and students engaged in the process. Chemical Engineering Education. *co-second authorship. https://doi.org/10.18260/2-1-370.660-70857
You can use this website to complete the workshop on your own by navigating to the Workshop tab. We welcome folks to complete this workshop either alone or with a group of peers. Regardless of method, we recommend you complete the pages, and subsequently find a colleague to engage in the question review process with.
If you’re interested in accessing questions written by other workshop participants or sharing your problem with the wider community, please see the Question Repository tab. If you wish to share your ARDEI-context question, contact us and we will try to add your question to the repository after review.
If you’d like to learn more about us, the workshop creators, please navigate to the Workshop Creators tab! Our contact information is available if you have any questions or would like to collaborate!