Anti-Racism Practice in Engineering: Exploring, Learning & Solutions (ARPELS)

Recent events have brought systemic racism and racial injustice in all facets of society into sharp focus. The Inclusive Engineering Consortium (IEC), a recently formed consortium of HBCU, HSI, and TCU ECE programs, recognizes the need and opportunity this has created to stimulate action on creating a more just and welcoming environment for underrepresented minorities in engineering education. IEC members are compelled by our mission to make a stand together in treating everyone with equity and respect, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender identity or orientation, age, disability, citizen status, or national origin. Accordingly, and in response to both national calls for racial justice and exigencies in higher education around equity and representation, we delivered a series of capacity-building workshops in 2021 to 1) promote an understanding of inequitable patterns and 2) introduce participants to frameworks that help to counter them. Actionable steps were identified to mitigate the deleterious effects of exclusion in engineering education and to facilitate collaboration of individuals and institutions in a way that enables tangible change. The IEC Social Justice Workshop Series (Anti-Racism Practice in Engineering: Exploring, Learning & Solutions or ARPELS) was organized to occur before and after the 2021 Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads (ECEDHA) conference series in March 2021 to disseminate results and recommendations to representatives of over 230 ECE departments from the US and Canada, and recruit participants for additional sessions. The overarching goals of the 3-part workshop series were 1) building capacity in understanding and embracing anti-racist methods; 2) inspiring self-reflection and organizational review around equity and inclusion and 3) launching transformational change at both the individual and systems levels. All sessions were organized similarly. Each began with an overview of the key session topic, followed by breakouts where participants could identify concrete steps to respond to issues raised. Sessions were conducted over two days-Tuesday and Thursday-to allow time for reflection between the opening and closing segments. Session 1 focused on building an understanding of anti-racism and its relevance to engineering. Session 2 focused on forging equitable partnerships, especially between IEC MSI member programs and Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). Session 3 began with a panel discussion of 5 African-American academics representing different levels of administration and addressed issues raised by the panel. The first three sessions (winter and spring 2021) were followed by an additional workshop session (fall 2021) focused on catalyzing research teams with partners from MSIs, PWIs and industry. For all four sessions, the key measures of success came from the lively and fruitful discussions reported on from the breakouts, which provided many excellent ideas that are being implemented by IEC to fulfill its mission of enabling its member programs to address together the issues they are unable to handle alone.