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The twenty-first century will be dominated by technological change as the United States competes in an increasingly interdependent world. If the United States is to maintain its technological leadership, an inclusive engineering education is required. Engineering impacts many important aspects of day-to-day life from the environment to national security and half of our graduate degrees in engineering are granted to foreign nationals. While this influx of creative talent enriches the academic community, the underutilization of domestic talent threatens the engineering enterprise with professional shortages in university classrooms, research facilities, and corporate boardrooms. We are simultaneously challenged with addressing the shrinking pool of African-American males in higher education. The challenge is daunting but not insurmountable. Many African-American students have aspirations for engineering without the preparation and the community college is well suited to provide the bridge between aspiration and accomplishment. Community colleges serve 46% of all African-American students in higher education and there are exemplary programs that have tapped the underdeveloped resources in the African-American community. One example is the Emerson Minority Engineering Scholarship Program. By utilizing best practices, this program has helped to increase the pool of African-American engineers by providing opportunities to students who may have made other academic choices. This paper reviews persistence literature and discusses the challenges and strategies in developing a community college-based minority engineering program.

Morgan State University (Morgan) is a leading undergraduate institution for black science and engineering doctoral degree recipients. Morgan also is a leader in the production of black engineering degree recipients in the United States. This chapter provides a historic overview of the major programs with a tie to the impact on the institutional metrics, a discussion of the process for developing researchers in science and engineering, and alumni perspectives. The undergraduate research development models used in engineering at Morgan are compared and contrasted with the life sciences and physical sciences. The programs focus on developing communities of engineering practice and communities of science, thereby enhancing students’ self-efficacy and resilience, shaping disciplinary identity, and creating learning communities. These approaches are critical for the success of minority students and are supported by the social science literature. Best practices have been adopted at varying levels by the School of Engineering, the School of Computer Mathematics and Natural Science and the Behavioral Science departments that have netted these Ph.D. outcomes including multiyear mentored research, research training courses, and participation in professional meetings. Multiple approaches to student development, when matched with the disciplinary culture, are shown to result in national impact.

The purpose of this study was to examine the learning experiences of high school Black males participating in an academy of engineering that was configured as a magnet school. We followed a qualitative case study design to explore the experiences of 16 Black male academies of engineering students. We identified three recurring themes from the interviews with the Black male academy of engineering students: Promoting Interests in STEM, Drawing Connections to Core Academic Concepts, and An Affinity for Hands-on Learning through the Engineering Curriculum. The results of our study helped us to better understand how academies provide a platform for Black male students' interest in engineering as a viable college and career pathway.

The chapter presents the implementation of ethics education via challenge-based learning (CBL) in three European settings. At TU Eindhoven (the Netherlands), a mandatory first-year User, Society, and Enterprise course on the ethics and history of technology offers a CBL alternative on ethics and data analytics in collaboration with internal student and research teams. The University of Lübeck (Germany) initiated the project CREATE – Challenge-based Learning for Robotics Students by Engaging Start-Ups in Technology Ethics, which enables 60 students in Robotics and Autonomous Systems to integrate ethical and societal considerations into technological development processes, in cooperation with start-ups from a local accelerator. In Spain, CBI-Fusion Point brings together 40 students from business and law (ESADE), engineering and technology (Polytechnic University of Catalonia), and design (IED Barcelona Design University) for an innovation course focused on the application of CERN-developed technologies to real-world problems. The chapter documents the process of setting up three CBL courses that engage students with grand societal topics which require the integration of ethical concerns from the design stage of technological development. The authors also reflect on the challenges of teaching ethics via CBL and the lessons they learned by delivering experiential learning activities rooted in real-life challenges and contexts marked by high epistemic uncertainty. The contribution reflects the transition to remote teaching and presents strategies employed to enhance online communication and collaboration. The chapter thus provides guidance for instructors interested in teaching ethics via CBL and recommends further lines for action and research.

It is well-known and documented that despite a plethora of efforts by institutions to broaden participation in engineering, the representation, retention, and degree completion of Black males in engineering continues to lag. Coupled with a lack of representation, there is also a dearth of research that has sought to understand the experiences of Black males in engineering. In this chapter, through the lens of Hildegard Peplau's (1991) interpersonal relations theory, we sought to explore the experiences of nine undergraduate Black male engineering majors with academic advisors. Academic advisors are strategically positioned in higher education settings as guides to help students navigate college culture, policies, and procedures. Using thematic analysis, three salient themes emerged: “spots are limited,” building their own “advising team,” and prescriptive perceptions. As institutions imagine routes for broadening participation in engineering, they might also consider how they support advisors and encourage relationship development between students and advisors.

There is a growing demand in industry for engineering graduates who can think “sustainably.” However, there are many barriers to developing assessment that fosters sustainability learning in engineering classrooms. There is no consensus on the definition of sustainability and its key competencies and teaching resources are limited.

Staff are unclear about what to teach, how to teach, and how to assess learning. Assessment is an integral part of teaching and learning and should be planned from the earliest stages, but this is rarely done. Engineering relies heavily on traditional assessments such as tests and examinations, but these are known to encourage surface learning. Sustainability is complex, multidisciplinary, and needs context, which requires higher-order thinking characteristic of deep learning.

Current assessment types for sustainability include examinations, case study, concept maps, and project-based learning. However, more research is needed to develop best practice assessments. Recommendations for teaching approach are to use a rigorous approach to instructional design, use a systems approach, and use a teaching model that promotes deep learning, incorporates context, and promotes alignment of learning objectives and assessment. Community-oriented assessments are recommended that feature the interdisciplinarity and complexity of sustainability and promote higher-order thinking.

This chapter aims to present the context, the approach and the pedagogical tools deployed at École Centrale Marseille (ECM) to promote gender equality in engineering education. The ECM has put several mechanisms in place such as challenging traditional gender stereotypes, social representation of the engineering profession and facing the realities of a professional world that is overwhelmingly masculine, including awareness of the glass ceiling effect on access to positions of responsibility and prevention of sexual harassment. The ECM model combines multidisciplinary studies with a professional grounding with the aim of educating students to be able to transform society. In 1997, the ECM founded the Mediterranean Network of Engineering Schools with the main goal of fostering sustainable development in the Mediterranean basin. The ECM has been part of the community of practice on gender equality initiated by Mediterranean Network of Engineering Schools through its participation in the H2020 TARGET project on gender equality in research and higher education.

In this study, we critically examine how students enrolled in a combined engineering and teacher education program given at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, understand the concept of sustainable development (SD) and the professional responsibilities of engineers versus teachers in contributing to this goal. A questionnaire was used to collect and analyze data based on five research questions: (1) How do students conceptualize the notion of SD? (2) What aspects of SD are students interested in? (3) Are there any gender differences in what aspects of SD students are interested in? (4) How do students perceive the roles and responsibilities of engineers versus teachers in contributing to SD? and (5) How confident are students in their abilities to address SD issues vocationally? The data indicated a conventional view of SD among the students; a clear interest in sustainability issues, especially for ecologically linked questions; a tendency to ascribe significant but differentiated responsibilities to engineers/teachers; and a low degree of confidence in their own ability to adequately address SD issues vocationally. The data also indicated differences between male and female students when looking at interest in different aspects of SD. Overall, female students were found to be slightly more interested in SD than the male students. This gender difference is larger in relation to social aspects than ecological or economic aspects. It is suggested that future sustainable development education needs a shift of focus from what separates female and male students to what unites them. The observed “confidence gap” that exists between stated degree of interest in, and perceived importance of, sustainability issues, suggests the potential for significant improvement of the design of the Master of Science in Engineering and in Education program (CL-program).

Since 2009, different challenge-based learning (CBL) activities have been implemented at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), with a shared objective: provide the students a learning experience that covers the acquisition of technical knowledge, soft skills, and other generic competences, while bringing them closer to the current technologies and industry. The shared background of these activities is the participation of Master's students of aerospace engineering in the preliminary design of a space mission. During the 18/19 academic year, the UPM participated in the 2018 ESA Concurrent Engineering Challenge (ESA CEC), where the students complemented their technical knowledge with dedicated training in Concurrent Engineering and learnt how ESA assesses the feasibility of real space missions. This experience further motivated the organization of the UPM CEC, which was first executed in the 19/20 academic year (and is expected to be carried out in future courses). After a decade implementing CBL, different research methodologies and instruments have been used to evaluate its impact on different aspects of the learning process. In this chapter, we describe the main CBL activities performed, focusing on the instruments used to evaluate them. We draw attention to the main advantages and disadvantages of implementing CBL from a learning perspective, as well as the associated impact in the student's motivation and student–teacher relationship. In many cases, different teaching scenarios are assessed, thus making it possible to compare CBL against traditional methods.

In January 2016, Georgia Tech launched a campus-wide academic initiative (“Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain”) aimed at preparing undergraduate students in all majors to use their disciplinary knowledge and skills to contribute to the major societal challenge of creating sustainable communities. The initiative calls for faculty members from all six Georgia Tech colleges to develop courses and co-curricular opportunities that will help students learn about sustainability and community engagement and hone their skills by engaging in real-world projects with nonprofit, community, government, and business partners. Affiliated courses address various aspects of the Center’s sustainable communities framework, which presents sustainability as an integrated system connecting environment, economy, and society. This chapter reports on one engineering instructor’s ongoing efforts that bring sustainability into the engineering classroom through sociotechnical project-based learning. This cornerstone design course is one of more than 100 Center-affiliated courses currently offered; the full set of Center-affiliated courses enrolls over 5,000 students per year across all six colleges. The sustainability activities introduced in the freshman design course pertain particularly to the Center’s vision that all graduates of the institute, a majority of whom will graduate with engineering degrees, are able to contribute to the creation of sustainable communities and to understand the impact of their professional practice on the communities in which they work. A situated knowledge and learning pedagogical theory is used in the Center-affiliated course, where concept, activity, and context are involved in student learning to produce useable robust knowledge. The sociotechnical project-based teaching model with contextualized design problems is used to engage students throughout the course by utilizing computer-aided-design problems that incorporate sustainability within both individual and team projects. In this chapter, the authors present the pedagogical approaches to learning, strategies, and challenges for implementation and assessment of intervention activities, and data analyses of both student reflection data and pre- and post-survey data.