4/19/2023 Bethan Owen
Bioengineering Professors Holly Golecki, Rebecca Reck and several other UIUC professors received funding from the IDEA Institute and the IMB-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute for their proposal “Fostering Inclusive Lab and Design Courses.”
Written by Bethan Owen
What does it mean to support diversity and inclusivity in education? In a standard classroom, it might be ensuring that a wide range of people and ideas are represented in discussions and readings. Lab settings benefit from that same diversity of thought, but often also require more hands-on diversity efforts.
“Lab and design courses have their own unique aspects to inclusion,” said Bioengineering Professor Rebecca Reck. “If you're colorblind, reading color codes on equipment can be difficult. There are some labs on campus that are difficult or impossible to access from a wheelchair.”
After receiving funding from the IDEA Institute and the IMB-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute for their proposal “Fostering Inclusive Lab and Design Courses,” Bioengineering Professors Reck, Holly Golecki and several other UIUC professors now have the opportunity to analyze and correct some of these lab settings that can be obstacles to student learning.
“I'm really excited to be involved in the project,” said Professor Golecki. “Anytime we can make classrooms more inclusive for every student is great for our college culture and for getting a more diverse group of individuals into the engineering profession. That starts by supporting them in their classrooms so that they can feel like they can bring their whole selves to class and succeed without barriers to their education.”
With this grant, which is part of the Grassroots Initiatives to Address Needs Together (GIANT) grant program, the team will be able to take an initial survey of campus to determine where labs are meeting their diversity goals and where improvements need to be made. The project will begin with a climate survey, to cast a wide net and hear from a broad audience how well diversity needs are currently being met.
Next, the group plans to work with different offices on campus to develop a rubric for lab design that any individual instructor could look at to determine whether improvements could be made to their lab space to better accommodate a diversity of needs.
That diversity of needs, Reck added, isn’t limited to physical elements of a lab.
“Asking students to focus on a lab for three hours straight can be difficult for some of our neurodiverse students, for example,” she said. “There are some really glaringly obvious things that are different about labs. The spaces and the equipment that we use may not be approachable for all of our students, but there's also some invisible or less obvious things.. There's a lot more that goes into working on some of these courses that hasn't been questioned at all in a lot of ways.”
As these important questions are asked, Reck and the team hope that lab education can become more accessible for all kinds of students, all across campus.
“My goal is to make instructional laboratories accessible and inclusive spaces for all students, allowing them to learn from hands-on STEM experiences, by creating resources for lab instructors that are informed by rigorous research in all aspects of laboratory course design,” said Reck.
Learn more about these goals and the efforts being made towards more inclusive labs at the Lab and Design Community of Practice website!