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Effective teachers use a variety of pedagogies to engage a wider diversity of students, providing a more equitable classroom. In this workshop, participants will explore the use of feminist and liberative pedagogies in CSET classrooms. These pedagogies are founded on the ideals of social justice and democracy. The workshop will include discussions of classroom management strategies, critiques and redesign of the engineering process, and assessment and evaluation of student learning. Participants will leave the workshop with a list of concrete ideas for implementing feminist and liberative pedagogies and an annotated bibliography of helpful references. This workshop continues the collaborative work of these authors, presented in a 2004 Special Session and a 2005 Paper Session at FIE conferences.

A case study of the Montreal Massacre was employed in a core engineering thermodynamics class, using two video news clips to spur discussion about the event and about the intersection of gender identity and feminist politics with the engineering profession. In the pilot test of our lesson plan, students discussed strategies for addressing overt and subtle sexism, negotiating questions of dress in the profession, the ways they use gendered behavior or gender distancing as strategies, work-life balance, competition and women's success as a threat. Such concerns are not typically included in professionalization aspects of engineering curricula, but their importance for both women and men is evident. We present our lesson plan and discussion outcomes, and address multiple contexts in which this case can be utilized to teach about gender and engineering.

Understanding how women develop a sense of professional identity in engineering, computer science, and technology can inform the design of interventions to improve their rates of entry and persistence in these fields. We seek to understand how female students conceptualize and form personal and professional identities in the context of pursing a college education. In the initial phase of a five-year study at Smith College, we conducted interviews with undergraduate engineering and non-engineering majors. Participants were asked questions about their personal and professional goals, interests and destinations, their philosophies of education, and the role of student life experience and identity in their approach to learning. We report results to date for three key questions covering each of these topics, and offer a preliminary comparative analysis that describes differences by field of study and by class year.