Enabling Conversations About Privilege and Discrimination in Engineering Classrooms Through an Inequitable Decision-Making Activity

What the paper says

Having conversations in the classroom about privilege, discrimination, prejudice, and how these issues impact decision making can be difficult. This article presents an activity designed to simulate voter and voice suppression in the classroom. The activity, titled “The Energy Table Who Didn’t Get a Seat,” started by asking students to use concepts from class to decide where to invest money to mitigate the effects of a winter storm on vulnerable communities. Then, the instructor simulated voice suppression, discrimination, macroaggressions, and prejudice in class by excluding certain groups from being able to submit their proposals for consideration. Throughout the class, students were given opportunities to advocate for themselves, yet they rarely did. At the beginning of the activity, students voted for which of their classmates’ proposals they believed was the best. However, by the end of the voter and voice suppression activity, 24%–46% of the students abstained from voting, highlighting the frustration they felt during the simulation. The class concluded with a discussion about how biases impact decision making. After the instructor revealed that the discrimination was part of a simulation, many expressed shock and surprise that they had not advocated for themselves during the activity. Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [Grants 2121730 and 2315029], the Wimmer Faculty Fellowship from Carnegie Mellon University, and the Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation [Grant 2053856]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ited.2023.0053 .