Looking Ahead: Student's Perceptions of Diversity before and after a Diversity Workshop

As the U.S. population shows increasing racial and ethnic diversity (Craig, Rucker, and Richeson 2018), it is imperative that engineering educators take steps to create a more inclusive engineering education environment. Several colleges in the U.S. have introduced diversity initiatives such as faculty/staff diversity training (O'Leary et al. 2020), diversity-focused workshops (Rheingans et al. 2018), and even mentoring programs to women and underrepresented racial and ethnic groups (Young 2018; Ikuma et al. 2019). At the University of Iowa, the College of Engineering recently established the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Council, and with their support, the authors aimed to learn about first-year engineering students' perceptions of diversity. To this end, the authors developed a hands-on workshop to facilitate conversation about diversity and learn how the students perceive diversity. While other institutions have also adopted diversity training for first-year engineering students, this pilot study is novel because it frames the conversation about diversity from the student's perspective rather than from the perspective of training, which has been shown to be ineffective (Naff and Kellough 2003; Chang et al. 2019; Dobbin and Kalev 2018). This education-based conversational approach is novel in that it leads to the inclusion, in addition to race and gender, of other dimensions of diversity that are rarely included in diversity training, including, but not limited to, sexual orientation, non-binary gender identity, age, political views, and religious beliefs.