All In For Engineering: Co-designing a neuro-inclusive future
All In For Engineering: Co-designing a neuro-inclusive future
Online eventexternal
We believe that an inclusive and positive university experience for neurodiverse engineering students is fair, healthy, and what the engineering profession – and society – needs. Universities and engineering faculties have varying responses to the needs of their neurodiverse students, from the legally dubious to those which allow individuals to genuinely flourish.
This work aims to capture these different areas of performance and express them as a neuro-inclusion maturity framework for engineering education. In going about this, we are committed to an approach of co-design – working with a community of students, academics, and professional services colleagues to shape a maturity framework that will help universities to understand and improve their own neuro-inclusive practices.
On June 20th, we co-hosted a ‘Co-Designing a Neuro-inclusive Future’ event with the Dyson Institute. At the event, we brought together teams from more than 10 different universities to start to define a neuro-inclusion maturity framework for engineering education. By the end of the day, we had identified the domains that would be in such a framework and have started to populate the extremities in such a framework. We agreed next steps, and above, all have established a productive co-design approach where different people are treated as equal members in the design process, recognising that relevant experience and expertise lies in many different places. We wanted students to be meaningful collaborators in this work – thinking about this with them rather than for them, so we brought together students, professional services colleagues, and academics from the very beginning,
So, the next step is a webinar on Thursday 25th July at 2pm to move the work forward and include those who prefer to engage in a different way to the approach used so far. We will be sharing back what happened at the co-design event, have another co-design activity, and continue building a community of people who want to see engineering education become more inclusive.
This is open to all and you can pre-register below.
Following the event, we will be seeking to recruit participants for a Delphi panel to build consensus around the framework itself over the next few months. If you would like to volunteer for this, please complete this form. Please circulate this to your colleagues and students. We are committed to maintaining a balance of voices in this work.
The form closes 9th October 4pm.
At the online workshop, we’ll be sharing the overall programme vision, sharing our methodology in moving forward, sharing an idea of our discussions on 20th, and taking feedback on direction, usefulness, existing resources, and soliciting ongoing contributions.
The work already completed shaped (and help populate with practice examples) the attached work-in-progress we will be sharing tomorrow.
Please see the dimensions and domains resulting from the initial session below. Please note that intention is to show the kinds of things people at the earlier workshop were talking about and our attempts to start to make sense of that, rather than to present content beyond the a proposed axes of the framework.
The real work will happen in the Delphi process and in the toolkit development.
People and things we know are great (stakeholder resources, good practice resources, other signposting).
