- Rocio Chavela Guerra
- Director
- EAGER: Promoting LGBTQ Equality in Engineering through Virtual Communities of Practice
- http://diversity.asee.org/lgbtq/
- American Society for Engineering Education, Rowan University
- Stephanie Farrell
- Professor and Chair
- EAGER: Promoting LGBTQ Equality in Engineering through Virtual Communities of Practice
- http://diversity.asee.org/lgbtq/
- Rowan University, American Society for Engineering Education
EAGER: Promoting LGBTQ Equality in Engineering through Virtual Communities of...
NSF Awards: 1539140
Research in the nascent field of LGBTQ experiences in STEM has shown that engineering can be a “chilly climate” for LGBTQ students and professionals. This climate can be found in every sector of STEM professions, where cultural norms and professional ideologies make it difficult to recognize and rectify exclusionary practices.
This project addresses the critical need to diversify the engineering workforce by increasing the participation of LGBTQ students and faculty. The project supports the development of a Virtual Community of Practice committed to fostering LGBTQ inclusion in engineering, whose members are: (1) equipped to implement strategies for fostering an inclusive climate, (2) empowered to take action to advance LGBTQ equality in their departments, (3) engaged in nationwide dissemination of strategies and promising practices for LGBTQ inclusion in engineering. The Virtual Community of Practice offers a mechanism for members to share knowledge, ideas, and resources and to support one another as they develop and implement action plans to promote LGBTQ equality in their engineering departments and colleges.
Community members have focused on the systematic development and formative refinement of an online “Safe Zone” course to provide inclusion training to engineering students and professionals nationwide. Safe Zone workshops create a network with the awareness, knowledge and skills to create a more inclusive environment for LGBTQ faculty and students. To maximize the visibility and impact of the Safe Zone workshops, they are offered both online and at engineering professional society conferences.
EAGER: Promoting LGBTQ Equality in Engineering through Virtual Communities of...
NSF Awards: 1539140
Research in the nascent field of LGBTQ experiences in STEM has shown that engineering can be a “chilly climate” for LGBTQ students and professionals. This climate can be found in every sector of STEM professions, where cultural norms and professional ideologies make it difficult to recognize and rectify exclusionary practices.
This project addresses the critical need to diversify the engineering workforce by increasing the participation of LGBTQ students and faculty. The project supports the development of a Virtual Community of Practice committed to fostering LGBTQ inclusion in engineering, whose members are: (1) equipped to implement strategies for fostering an inclusive climate, (2) empowered to take action to advance LGBTQ equality in their departments, (3) engaged in nationwide dissemination of strategies and promising practices for LGBTQ inclusion in engineering. The Virtual Community of Practice offers a mechanism for members to share knowledge, ideas, and resources and to support one another as they develop and implement action plans to promote LGBTQ equality in their engineering departments and colleges.
Community members have focused on the systematic development and formative refinement of an online “Safe Zone” course to provide inclusion training to engineering students and professionals nationwide. Safe Zone workshops create a network with the awareness, knowledge and skills to create a more inclusive environment for LGBTQ faculty and students. To maximize the visibility and impact of the Safe Zone workshops, they are offered both online and at engineering professional society conferences.
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Alexander Rudolph
Very nice video! I really like the idea of using webinars to bring in a larger group of people into your training. I have a couple of questions, some of which are relevant to our project, Cal-Bridge, which is working to bring more underrepresented students into PhD programs in physics and astronomy (http://stemforall2018.videohall.com/p/1277).
1) Do you think some of your webinar material could be adapted to mentoring other groups (URMs, women, disabled students, etc.)? Is it currently publicly available?
2) Have you been working at all with the astronomy community? The American Astronomical Society has a committee for LGBTQ issues, the Committee for Sexual-Orientation and Gender Minorities in Astronomy (SGMA). I am sure they would love to work with you. Their website is: https://sgma.aas.org.
Rocio Chavela Guerra
Pati Ruiz
Stephanie Farrell
Professor and Chair
Thank you for your interest in our video and project!
1. The webinars could definitely be used to help develop allies for other groups. The content would have to be different - but they are framed in the four steps of ally development - awareness, knowledge, skills and action. Materials can be found on our website https://diversity.asee.org/lgbtq/
2. Thanks for pointing us to the astronomy community! We will reach out to that group.
Pati Ruiz
Lawrence Lesser
Nice work! Here's an example the statistics education community publicized a decade ago.
Stephanie Farrell
Pati Ruiz
Rocio Chavela Guerra
Director
Hi, Lawrence! Thank you for visiting our video and sharing that link.
Sarah Wille
Senior Research Scientist
Thanks for this important work! I'd love to hear a bit about your strategies to attract/recruit a diverse range of engineering faculty to participate, and a sample of some of the strategies you hope they employ to begin to make some movement toward more inclusive learning and working environments.
Rocio Chavela Guerra
Director
Hi Sarah,
Thank you for your interest in our project!
For the virtual community of practice (VCP), in the first iteration we launched a recruitment campaign that was advertised through ASEE institutional channels—the audience include faculty, students, and academic staff and administrators (e.g., department chairs, and deans) in engineering, engineering technology departments/schools. From there, the group continued to grow organically via referrals from community members—with new members joining at any point in time. We will soon be piloting a process in which new members will join at specific times over the year with the intention of creating a mini-cohort experience.
For the Safe Zone workshops, we started offering face-to-face sessions at ASEE’s national annual conference. To ensure maximum opportunity for participation, we offered Safe Zone workshops at every single time slot available for concurrent technical sessions during the entire conference. We have continued to offer workshops at ASEE’s annual conference, and have expanded our offerings to include (a) presentations and/or workshops at other societies’ events (e.g., AIChE, AAAS, and ACS); and (b) online workshops.
We share a brief list of inclusive classroom strategies that participants can start implementing after the workshops (e.g., including a diversity statement in their syllabus, examine own assumptions, avoid stereotypes, model inclusive language). The list is available at https://docs.asee.org/public/LGBTQ/Inclusive_Classroom_Strategies.pdf.
Stephanie Farrell
Professor and Chair
Hi Sarah,
Thank you for your question! When we launched the community we advertised to the diverse group of participants who had attended diversity-related workshops at the ASEE annual conference. We also have an advisory panel who are leaders in networks with diverse memberships, and they supported our efforts by circulating our announcements among to their members.
Juan Sarmiento
Thanks for the important work! I'd love to hear more about literature related to the "train the trainer" model, which seems the correct approach to spread information and shift organizational cultures in these areas. Also, I would love to hear about some of the challenges and problems that you guys have been facing in the project.
Stephanie Farrell
Professor and Chair
Dear Juan,
Thank you for your interest in our work! Here is link to the paper describing a model that inspired our work.
The original model was developed to support the adoption of evidence-based instructional practice, but we thought that the VCP concept was relevant to supporting the development of Safe Zone workshops facilitators and advocates for promoting LGBTQ+ inclusion.
Christopher Atchison
Associate Professor
Very nice representation of your project, Stephanie and Rocio. I love the broad reach your able to have through your virtual communities of practice. What challenges have you faced in getting people involved to sustain the momentum you've created?
Stephanie Farrell
Professor and Chair
Hi Christopher,
Thank you for your nice words about the video. Quite honestly I believe that the main challenge has been scheduling of our virtual meetings - finding a time that works well for the VCP members at different institutions across multiple time zones. We have just very recently started an asynchronous communication platform to mitigate this problem - we plan to use this in combination with synchronous virtual meetings.
Pati Ruiz
Dean of Studies
I agree with the other comments. This work is so important! I am curious about the online communities and how online facilitation differs from face to face sessions. How are yo able to maintain positive spaces and how many people (and how much time) does that take? How do the communities continue to interact during and after sessions?
Stephanie Farrell
Professor and Chair
Hi Pati,
Thank you so much for your interest in our project and for your question! Just a point of clarification - we have Safe Zone workshops both online and face-to-face. This is different from our Virtual Community of Practice which meets primarily online. I believe your question is asking about the Virtual Community of Practice meetings. We meet online about once per month using an online conferencing system (Adobe Connect) - we have a facilitator who guides the conversation, and a meeting host who provides technical/logistical support. We recently set up an asynchronous communication platform (see previous post) which will help keep conversations going between sessions. I hope this answers your question.
Gretal Leibnitz
Hi Rocio and Stephanie!
So great to see you at the recent CoNECD Conference and learn more about your work here! I am wondering wondering how long your community of practice (CoP) has been active? From my own experience, there is a lot of momentum for keeping a CoP vibrant and active when there is grant funding and formal support, but once the funding is gone it can be come more challenging to sustain momentum. What is your experience?
Also, as you may remember, the Women in Engineering ProActive Network (WEPAN) has been engaged in the Transforming Engineering Culture to Advance Inclusion and Diversity (TECAID) project (http://videohall.com/p/1295) and part of the work involves exposing engineers to information that is important to helping them lead department culture change. What do you think are critical resources that TECAID people should know about changing engineering culture to be more inclusive of LGBTQ members? Thanks!
Pati Ruiz
Stephanie Farrell
Professor and Chair
Hi Gretal,
I realized that I accidentally created a new post instead of replying to yours. Please see below for what was supposed to be my reply.
Stephanie
Stephanie Farrell
Professor and Chair
Hi Gretal,
It was great to see you at CoNECD! Thank you for your interest in our project.
Our CoP has been active since 2015. We have considered the issue of sustainability of the community beyond the timeframe of the grant, but we have not had to cross that bridge yet. We have worked hard to build a community with a shared vision that works together to achieve goals of the community - and also to support the goals of individual members. These are necessary foundations for sustainability, but we are also exploring opportunities to fund specific core community activities after the timeframe of the grant (e.g., workshops).
Until now our core activities have focused mainly on individual level change - education to increase awareness and create allies. The next phase of the project will begin to focus on culture, advocacy and policy change, and I think we can learn a lot from your work on the TECAID project. I loved your TECAID video (http://videohall.com/p/1295) and if it is OK, I will reach out to you after reviewing the resources on your website!
For critical resources, there are a number of resources on our website (http://diversity.asee.org/lgbtq/resources/resources-and-handouts) that focus on strategies to create inclusive departments and classrooms. Also, relevant to engineering culture specifically - I would highly recommend the Deep Dive workshop on Engineering Culture by Erin Cech on our webinar archive page (http://diversity.asee.org/lgbtq/safe-zone-workshops/safe-zone-ally-training-online-workshop-series) which provides some very interesting insights.
Patti
Great job. Thank you for the information
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