The National Science Foundation has awarded researchers at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute nearly $150,000 to study how to make LGBT students “feel comfortable” in their engineering classes — because, the study’s abstract says, “[e]ngineering schools are notoriously inhospitable to LGBTQ people.”
The Washington Free Beacon reports that the study researchers also assert that “engineering programs full of straight students are ‘less creative.’”
“The emotional toll of being an LGBTQ engineer (either open or closeted) is so great that it threatens to drive LGBTQ engineers out of the field,” the grant states.
“Their departure from engineering for reasons that have nothing to do with qualification only makes the field more homogenous and therefore less creative, innovative, and risk-taking, at the same time diminishing a population that is already underrepresented in engineering.”
The researchers say that not enough study has been dedicated to how LGBT engineering students feel.
“While researchers understand the conventions of engineering culture that can damage non-heterosexual engineering students and engineers, they still know very little about how engineering cultures can support these same engineers,” the grant states.
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Interviews and focus groups with LGBT students will be held in order to identify the “elements of the most inclusive and supportive spaces” in engineering programs.
“In identifying those experiences, opportunities, and practices that are most supportive of LGBTQ engineering students, the research is also identifying the same experiences that help develop the emotional intelligence and cross-cultural sensitivity and communication that will support all engineers, including but not exclusively other underrepresented populations,” the grant said. “Using the principle of universal design, this project is piloting educational interventions to support all forms of diversity in engineering education.”
The grant also states that “[t]o understand the conditions that support” LGBTQ engineering students, “an interdisciplinary team of humanists and engineers” are working “to learn the theoretical foundations of 21st-century theories of mind, focusing on how cognition is tied to bodily experience.”
Read the full WFB article and grant abstract.
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