“Culturally Relevant Engineering Design” by Avneet Hira

As a part of the faculty development program lecture series Avneet Hira, from School of Engineering Education; Purdue University conducted a one day workshop on Culturally Relevant Engineering Design (CRED). In her informational talk, she elaborated the ground role underlying the importance culturally relevant teaching and illustrate how this approach to instruction can boost student engagement, students’ feeling of belonging within their school and positively impact on student achievement as well. She started the workshop with an engaging discussion on the importance and implications of engineering design, aspects of design thinking, and map them to the broader engineering habits of mind.

In her presentation she explained how 21st centuries educator can use CRED as a pedagogical toll to empowers their student intellectually, socially, and emotionally by using cultural referents to impart  knowledge, skills, and attitudes. During her interaction with the SOE faculty she shared the course outline  for a CRED inspired course. After which the participants was break into different group and was asked to relate CRED with their own course objective. This was followed with a brainstorming session on ideas for CRED inspired projects and courses, to concretize the concept learned during workshop. In his valedictory address Dr. Bh. V. Krishna Rao, Dean JRE School of Engineering emphasized the importance of design aspect in engineering curriculum.