“The Undergraduate Engineering Collaborative Growth Series”: a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Program Supporting the Empowerment of Marginalized Students

The authors present a Full Paper in the Research-To-Practice category. Educational institutions are increasingly looking toward diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as a means of addressing inequities with regards to student representation rates and outcomes. We recognize that the field of engineering was historically designed and continues to operate for the benefit of straight, cis, white, affluent men. Often, institutions offer supplemental programming to students who do not embody this set of identities as a means of support, seeking to more effectively integrate them into fundamentally inequitable structures. Typically, due to the top-down nature of this supplemental programming, it presents additional barriers to challenging the existence of these structures or empowering students to enact equity-centered change. Alternatively, we sought to design a program for marginalized engineering students that reduced barriers to the expression of their whole selves, including the value of their identities within the engineering educational space. Applying critical and liberative theoretical frameworks, we invited marginalized students to organize within themselves to enact changes to even the most fundamental aspects of the existing educational structure. This program, the Undergraduate Engineering Collaborative Growth Series, was implemented at a large, prestigious research university in the United States and monetarily paid students for the labor associated with their participation. It consisted of a series of workshops that aimed to support the development of a community that recognized commonalities across experiences and organized to meet their collective needs. This paper discusses the methods used to recruit and select participants for the series as well as outlines facilitation and data collection methods. The collected data forms the basis for ongoing research. In the future, we hope to expand the program to reach more students in more programs at more institutions. In doing so, the intention is to support the empowerment of marginalized students, the best experts in their own experiences, to connect forms of power to action that disrupts the barriers currently preventing them from expressing their whole, authentic selves within engineering academia.