Worcester Polytechnic Institute
IN-26: Innovation C

The Social Justice Faculty Learning Community (SJ FLC) initiative is a response to the need to consider the social and ethical implications of the STEM disciplines and the social justice teaching opportunities offered by STEM topics. The SJ FLC, spearheaded by Lisa Stoddard, Kathy Chen and Tiffiny Butler, exemplifies this by working towards the integration of social justice themes across the curriculum at WPI. The effort brought 11 faculty together in a workshop to develop ways to integrate social justice concepts and case studies into their courses and projects. Participating faculty represented disciplines across WPI, including Civil/Environmental Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, Humanities and Arts, Chemical Engineering, Interactive Media and Game Development, and Social Science and Policy Studies. They worked together to develop and actualize projects, course content, and assignments to increase the breadth and depth of understanding of how STEM fundamentally influences social justice. For example, courses in Civil and Chemical Engineering developed the case of the Flint water crisis to examine principles of infrastructure development and engineering ethics. Faculty from Biomedical Engineering included themes of access and equity to biomedical innovations, and Civil Engineering faculty looked at implicit racial biases in traffic engineering. This Faculty Learning Community was the first in a series of workshops and small grant programs that help STEM faculty identify, analyze and integrate cases, topics and themes of social justice in the way that they teach science, technology, engineering, and math.