About

The Developing Equity Minded Engineering Practitioners (DEEP) Center is a collaboration between the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Morgan State University. DEEP is funded by the National Science Foundation (Award #2308531). 

Mission and Vision

The DEEP Center's goal is to broaden participation by fostering equitable and inclusive teaching and learning environments. To achieve this, we will: 

• Co-develop, co-pilot and collect a repository of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) instructional examples built around core principles for faculty to adapt and infuse in their own curricula.
• Hold collaborative workshops for faculty to brainstorm and develop their own instructional examples and build communities of practice for inclusive teaching practices.
• Implement an effective analytical framework for assessing and integrating inclusive STEM teaching and learning.
• Articulate, evaluate, and share a model for collaboration between Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) and predominantly white institutions (PWIs)

Logic Model

DEEP will develop an instructor approach to induce a cultural change towards educating engineers, creating "change-agents" of practitioners and improving the educational experience and success of students, increasing retention and persistence of diverse populations and contributing to more positive and equitable student outcomes. 

1. Faculty communities of Practice (CoPs) co-create lesson examples or co-develop workshops.
2. CoPs share lesson examples in the DEEP repository or deliver DEI workshops to all faculty. Administer pre- and post-training measures and repeat for improvement. 
3. Ongoing faculty support in CoPs for development and implementation of DEI by collecting long-term follow-ups, sharing the repository publicly, sharing the model, and publishing the results. 
4. Cultivation of a more inclusive and equitable learning ecosystem through assessment of student outcomes, course satisfaction and retention, and measurement of student engagement and sense of belonging.