Several departments and faculty are tackling these important topics through the use of homework questions. Please read the Hirshfield and Mayes paper titled “Incorporating Inclusivity and Ethical Awareness into Chemical Reaction Engineering” (linked here and below), published in AIChE’s Chemical Engineering Education in Fall 2019, to see some examples of problems for a Kinetics class that addresses similar issues. The article also describes how providing example problems with a variety of contexts that are of interest students as well as those with contexts directly related to real-world problems and social justice can help create inclusive classroom that openly discusses and addresses engineering ethics. Our goal is to take this a step further and explicitly include anti-racism as well as social justice, but this article provides some good introductory context, rationale, and examples for what we are trying to achieve.
Note: in the Additional Resources and Reading page, there are a series of linked scholarly articles that either explain why it’s important to incorporate ARDEI and social justice concepts into engineering curriculum or that are examples of faculty who have successfully incorporated these concepts into class problems or modules. However, the examples of those incorporated into classes, with the exception of the published Thermodynamics textbook written by Donna Riley, don’t provide don’t provide specific details on the questions as the Hirshfield and Mayes paper does, and you would need to contact the authors if you were interested in using their questions/modules directly. We encourage you to read these articles for inspiration, but we have you read the Hirshfield and Mayes paper as they explicitly show the example problems in full detail.
As you read the paper, please think about the following questions:
How does incorporating real-world, and specifically ARDEI, topics into course content and example problems contribute to an inclusive teaching environment?
What is the potential impact of incorporating real-world, and specifically ARDEI, topics into course content and example problems on student engineering ethics?
With what frequency do you think you need to implement these problems within a course to see the impact on students and course climate?
Did this paper give you any ideas for ARDEI topics you could use as the context for your own course problems?
Hirshfield, L. J., & Mayes, H. B. (Fall 2019). Incorporating Inclusivity and Ethical Awareness into Chemical Reaction Engineering. Chemical Engineering Education, 53(4), 215-219. https://journals.flvc.org/cee/article/view/115891
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