Board 4: Curriculum on Diversity and Ethics: Impact in an Introductory Bioengineering Course

Abstract

is a graduate of the Bioengineering and Computer Science departments at the University of Washington. She developed curriculum concerning the interplay of diversity and ethics for undergraduate engineering students at UW and is interested in the power of education to enact change in future generations of engineers. She currently works for Microsoft in the Bay Area.

WIP: A Case Study of Integrating Inclusive Engineering Skills into a Middle-years Biomedical Engineering Course via Model-based Reasoning

“…For instance, one attempt to address product bias against disabled people has been the incorporation of universal design for product development into undergraduate courses (Blaser, Steele, & Burghstahler, 2015). However, the overwhelming bulk of the literature mentions only first-year courses such as (Gunnarsson, Birch, & Hendricks, 2019), or senior projects such as (Cezeaux, Keyser, Haffner, Kaboray, & Hasenjager, 2008) and (Nasir, Kleinke, & McClelland, 2016). The only mention of anything between the two was in (Blaser, Steele, & Burghstahler, 2015) with a list of modifications that could hypothetically be made to middle-years courses.…”

WIP: Integration of Inclusive Mindset in a Middle-Year Biomedical Engineering Course: a Study Over Healthcare Disparities via Story-Driven Learning

“…In our previous work (Nezafati, Chua and LeDoux, 2020) we mentioned the idea of creating value for the end-users and consideration of their demands are normally the focus of introductory designbased courses (Gunnarsson, Birch and Hendricks, 2019), or culminating senior capstone experiences or senior projects (Cezeaux et al, 2008;Nasir, Kleinke and McClelland, 2016). Given the fact that, traditionally the main focus of middle-years courses are on technical content and analytical procedure (Lord and Chen, 2014), the demand for attention to "middle-years" courses will be more vivid.…”

Teaching Social Justice to Engineering Students

“…We have previously published work describing a pilot effort (on-week module) where we introduced the interplay of engineering ethics and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) in a large introductory bioengineering course [21][22]. Our rationale was that students will readily accept that engineers have a code of ethics, but may not have made the connection that DEI is an ethical issue, and that any ethical practice includes DEI.…”

“…Recently, we described the launch of "Science and Engineering for Social Justice," a 5credit, writing-intensive, discussion-based course [23]. In the first three offerings, the course had had an enrollment of approximately 30-35 students from both STEM and non-STEM majors.…”