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This research paper presents an autoethnographic study of a faculty-led community of practice assembled to promote reflection as a process to improve equity in engineering courses. The faculty participants (authors) committed to enact a variety of practices in self-reflection, reflection with colleagues, and reflection with students during one semester to build more equitable teaching and learning opportunities in their courses. This commitment came after participation in a series of DEI faculty development workshops in the previous semester and exploration of reflection practices during the formation of the community of practice. The theoretical framework central to this work is Lave and Wenger’s (1991) communities of practice that emphasizes members’ coming together around a common interest to share experiences, to collaboratively improve their work, and to solve shared problems. Communities of practice are increasingly common as vehicles for faculty development, especially to promote high-quality, equitable instruction (Borboa-Peterson, Ozaki, & Kelsch, 2021; Hoyt, et al., 2020). As such, this paper examines the impact of a community of practice on reflective teaching to advance the authors’ interest in expanding equity-oriented classroom teaching and learning opportunities for all faculty and students. Rooted in autoethnographic methodology (Belbase, Luitel, & Taylor, 2008), the study explores individual narratives and their intersections with the stories of other community members to better understand the experiences of engineering faculty who use purposeful reflection to promote educational equity. The authors construct a shared narrative that grew from the interactions with fellow community of practice members and explore the culture of engineering education at their institution and the opportunities and challenges of advancing more equitable teaching and learning. Findings include prevalent themes of successes and limitations to supporting equitable classrooms, the impact of a reflection-driven community of practice on individual teaching performances, and the strengths and challenges of enacted reflection techniques for engineering educators. 

Reflection is often cited as a critical component of effective teaching, but the term itself and its related practices often remain ambiguous. Reflecting on one's teaching is an important exercise to better understand the approaches to and success towards creating inclusive classrooms. Therefore, engineering educators must become aware of reflective practices to be able to employ them in their work. We explored essential elements of highly effective reflection practices for equity-minded educators in a workshop where faculty participants learned about three reflective practices: (i) personal reflection, (ii) reflective engagement with colleagues, and (iii) reflection with students. Through collaboration with others, attendees evaluated various reflection techniques, discussed case studies, and considered supports and barriers to how purposeful reflection can support equity-minded engineering practitioners. From this workshop, a Community of Practice of faculty was formed to analyze individual reflective practices, identify practices applicable to their classrooms, and work together to employ reflection in seven classrooms across our college. In this practice paper, we evaluate each of the above reflective practices and their utility in contextualizing more equitable curricula in a variety of course types. Additionally, we provide an engineering education framework for using reflection to understand the classroom environment educators create and its impact on equitable student learning. This practice paper presents reflections from the workshop and outcomes from the Community of Practice activities to inform equity-minded reflective instruction in engineering. 

Abstract Experiential learning in biomedical engineering curricula is a critical component to developing graduates who are equipped to contribute to technical design tasks in their careers. This paper presents the development and implementation of an undergraduate and graduate-level soft material robotics design course focused on applications in medical device design. The elective course, offered in a bioengineering department, includes modules on technical topics and hands-on projects relevant to readings, all situated within a human-centered design course. After learning and using first principles governing soft robot design and exploring literature in soft robotics, students propose a new advance in the field in a hands-on design and prototype project. The course described here aims to create a structure to engage students in fabrication and the design approaches taken by practitioners in a specific field, applied here in soft robotics, but applicable to other areas of biomedical engineering. This teaching tips article details the pedagogical tools used to facilitate design and collaboration within the course. Additionally, we aim to highlight ways in which the course creates (1) opportunities to engage undergraduates in design in preparation for capstone courses, (2) outward facing opportunities to connect with practitioners in the field, and (3) the ability to adapt this hands-on experience within a typical lecture structure as well as a hybrid online and in-person offering, thus expanding its utility in bioengineering departments. We reflect on course elements that can inform future design-based course offerings in soft robotics and other design-based multidisciplinary fields in bioengineering. 

Abstract Advancing biologically driven soft robotics and actuators will involve employing different scaffold geometries and cellular constructs to enable a controllable emergence for increased production of force. By using hydrogel scaffolds and muscle tissue, soft biological robotic actuators that are capable of motility have been successfully engineered with varying morphologies. Having the flexibility of altering geometry while ensuring tissue viability can enable advancing functional output from these machines through the implementation of new construction concepts and fabrication approaches. This study reports a forward engineering approach to computationally design the next generation of biological machines via direct numerical simulations. This was subsequently followed by fabrication and characterization of high force producing biological machines. These biological machines show millinewton forces capable of driving locomotion at speeds above 0.5 mm s⁻¹. It is important to note that these results are predicted by computational simulations, ultimately showing excellent agreement of the predictive models and experimental results, further providing the ability to forward design future generations of these biological machines. This study aims to develop the building blocks and modular technologies capable of scaling force and complexity of these devices for applications toward solving real world problems in medicine, environment, and manufacturing.