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CDEI March 2021 Update from the Chair

Hello dear CDEI standing members, delegates, and friends,

It was wonderful to have such great participation and attendance at our two all-hands meetings at the end of February.  In total, we had 79 people join us, about 24% of our total membership.  For those who weren’t able to attend the meeting, you can find our slides here:

We talked a lot about the Year of Impact on Racial Equity which has been approved by the ASEE Board (Hip-Hip-Hooray!).

Click this link to sign up to be part of the Year of Impact on Racial Equity Taskforce:

We also highlighted some of the superb work of the Commission committees:

  1. 4 Scholar Spotlights on the CDEI Blog
  2. Two guest blog posts
  3. Many tweets and re-tweets @ASEEdiversity
  4. 17 Virtual workshops since May 2020
  5. New Work-in-Progress Feedback Series
  6. Constituent Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award rolled out this year
  7. Letter written in opposition to the Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping

On our recent quarterly meeting, we also asked for items you wanted to share with the community, and we heard back about these things:

  1. a STEM Faculty from the California State University System (CSU)? Please apply to an exciting NSF-funded project and become a Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach and learn how to apply strengths to advance your research and improve your teaching effectiveness. We are recruiting tenured STEM faculty to serve as coaches and new tenure-track/lecturer STEM faculty to be coached to promote early-career success for underrepresented minority STEM faculty. The project uses a culturally-informed strengths-based approach to support newer faculty coachees to bring their authentic selves to their careers as instructors, researchers, and leaders. You can access the Newer Faculty Coachees Application here until April 1, 2021. You can access the Tenured Faculty Coaches Application here until April 1, 2021.
  2. The University of Michigan is running some great EER and EDI seminars
  3. NAE is hosting a national meeting on admissions bias. Beth Cady and Beth Holloway are working on this.
  4. Jeremi London has a great podcast episode on social impact indicators (hosted by Ruth Streveler, June 3, 2020): click here to access it.
  5. Engineering Change Podcast by Yvette Pearson
  6. Cindy Rottmann will be doing a session at SEFI on why it’s important to infuse equity into engineering ethics case studies

Here are our upcoming CDEI meetings which all members (standing members, delegates, and friends) are encouraged to attend. Add these to your calendar. You’ll find the virtual meeting links posted in our group on the ASEE Hub.

  1. All Hands CDEI Business Meeting before the Annual Conference: Thursday 6/10/2021 10am-11:30am Pacific/1pm-2:30pm Eastern
  2. ASEE CDEI Social before the Annual Conference: Thursday 7/22/2021 3pm-4:30pm Pacific/ 6pm-7:30pm Eastern.

 

 

CDEI February/March updates:

 

Chairs Updates: Our proposal to the ASEE Board for a Year of Impact on Racial Equity was approved!  The year will start after the 2021 Annual Conference ends.  We will need your help to make the year of impact as powerful as possible.  Thanks to all the quarterly all-hands meeting attendees who provided great ideas for the three different focus areas that we proposed.  Your great ideas are all included in the google slides linked above.

We are also working with ASEE to raise visibility and address an issue with ASEE conference papers that become inaccessible to screen readers during the formatting process, and also a bigger issue that may need Author’s Kit revisions to make papers accessible prior to uploading.  Given turnover with ASEE staff, this is not likely to be fixed quickly, but we are working with ASEE to improve this aspect of the Annual Conference.

 Awards:  Papers were due 3/8, so be sure to nominate papers from your division/section for the Best DEI Paper award.

 We are also working with PIC Chair Beth Holloway to get information about CDEI Awards into the program chair kit/training and also the awards banquet.

Communications: We have new blog posts for you to check out: Scholar Spotlight of Dr. Carlotta Berry  and Scholar Spotlight of Dr. Lindsay Soh.  We also have a new guest blog post by Dr. Tracie Addy who writes about not underestimating the power of student voice. We are also tweeting- if you want us to re-tweet your DEI work, please complete this form to let us know what to tweet.

 Conference Planning: Conference planning committee is meeting on the 3rd Tuesday of each month at 12pm ET and 2pm ET.  This committee is dealing with a lot of changes with the new announcement that the conference may be both in person and virtual at a later date. We will keep folks updated on plans. We are still trying to figure out what this means for our planned workshops.

 Partnerships: This committee is going to be working on a delegate toolkit that will help divisions and sections to incorporate DEI focus into their work.

 Policy & Letters: We have been discussing internally how to better partner with local communities where our conference is located, to create more justice for those communities.  The Precollege division of ASEE does some partnering with local high school teachers at local sites.  We’d like to make sure ASEE as a whole is considering justice issues at the conference locations.

 Professional Development: Cultivating Inclusive Communities is moving along. We pivoted last month to provide more opportunities for people to participate. If you’d like to join the conversation and large group events, join us here.

  1. We began a new series of Work-in Progress Feedback workshops! On the fourth Thursday of the month, running from January to May 2021 from 3:30-5pm ET, we will have a two-part virtual session: 30 minutes of guided networking, and 60 minutes of small groups for feedback on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) related works in progress (WIP). Learn more here.
  2. See our youtube channel playlist here
  3. Want to submit a virtual workshop proposal? Click here
  4. Did you know we’ve had 17 virtual workshops since May 2020?  We are keeping the website updated with videos and content related to our virtual workshops: click here
  5. Subscribe to the google calendar so you don’t miss a CDEI PD event here
  6. If you are interested in supporting our professional development team efforts, please contact Meagan Pollock, the PD committee lead: MP@engineerinclusion.com

 Strategic Planning and Assessment: This committee is working on our new bylaws and putting together an updated strategic plan.

 

 

 

 

In Solidarity,

Liz Litzler

CDEI Chair 2020-2021