Centering Equity and Inclusion in Engineering Collaboration and Writing

This paper focuses on preliminary findings from a study that asked students and alumni to share their stories around teamwork and communication in engineering settings. In addition to student and alumni stories of teamwork, engineering faculty were interviewed to learn more about how they approach collaborative and communication-based projects and how consider diversity, equity, and inclusion in their teaching. The goal was to connect the ways that instructors frame these collaborative projects and to surface how implicit biases may emerge and impact students. The findings reported here focus on what students and alumni participants shared about their positive and negative collaborative experiences, with an emphasis on the intersections between those experiences and their background/identities that may elicit bias from their peers. This paper concludes with recommendations for educators to work toward reconceiving their collaborative and communication-based assignments and to begin uncovering their own implicit biases.