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How can the arts contribute to a culture of inclusivity within engineering? This paper explores preliminary findings from our study of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), a four-year, primarily engineering college whose longtime undergraduate curriculum requires all students to complete a substantial humanities project. Many engineering students at WPI choose to do this humanities work in theatre, where they study classic and contemporary plays and participate in productions. They have the option of writing an original play as their capstone project, and if successful their play may be staged for a campus audience. For 35 years, an original short play festival on this campus has performed the work of students. From nearly the beginning, these original plays featured the difficult themes of sexual identity and orientation. In 2017, to celebrate this rich heritage, the theatre program presented a retrospective of LGBTQ+ themed plays written and performed by students since 1987. We report here on our findings from a mixedmethod study of this theatre program and its influence on the culture at WPI. While in general, engineering culture is not a welcoming place for LGBTQ+ people or for open discussions about non-normative sexuality, the data we have collected around WPI's theatre program present a powerful exception to that rule. Our data set includes the scripts of 22 student- or alumni-authored plays on LGBTQ+ themes, a survey of 80 audience members at the 35-year retrospective of LGBTQ+ themed plays, and interviews with people associated with the theatre program, including its faculty director and several openly queer engineering students and alumni. Together, these documents make a compelling case that theatre can contribute to an engineering culture that is more than typically inclusive of non-normative sexualities (not just for people involved with the theatre program but for the educational culture at large). Because our study subjects are engineering majors, not liberal arts or theatre majors, the implications of our research can be extended to other engineering educators. We conclude with recommendations drawn from this study that can be applied to other engineering institutions (whether or not they have theatre programs). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the second half of a first-year course designed by an interdisciplinary team of faculty from engineering, humanities, social science, and entrepreneurship and innovation. Our course, "Humanitarian Engineering Past & Present," begins with a nineteenth-century sewerage problem before turning to currentday problems of sanitation. Having studied in depth the challenges of providing acceptable sanitation to an ethnically, economically, and topographically diverse community in a nineteenth century industrial city, long before sanitation was considered a basic human right, students form teams to identify and propose a solution to a sanitation problem in some particular part of the contemporary world. This paper discusses our classroom activities and the learning outcomes they produce, primarily around the ethically infused subject of sanitation, why it is a basic human right included in the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals, and why engineering students should be curious about how people live in parts of the world where sanitation has not yet been secured for all people. Our project aims to understand how students are motivated first to care about the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and then to develop the expertise to be able to help meet these goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an experimental first-year, two-term course designed by an interdisciplinary team of faculty from engineering, humanities, social science, and entrepreneurship and innovation. The first term of our course, "Humanitarian Engineering Past & Present: Worcester, 1885," puts students in the roles of actual people living in a turn-of-the-century industrial city in central Massachusetts. While immersing themselves in the roles of engineers, industrialists, elected officials, workers, scientists, public health officials, inventors, and city residents, students learn and practice engineering concepts (engineering design, stakeholder analysis, mass balance, sewage treatment, material properties and selection, sewage properties and conveyance, statics and stress, filtration and chemical precipitation, and so on). These engineering concepts, though, are not abstracted from social, political, and economic considerations. Rather, engineering is imbued with social context. Through class events like town hall meetings, debates, and stakeholder analyses, students in character, are exposed to different perspectives, values, priorities, and constraints. Additional out-of-class work such as individual reflective essays and team-based projects also engaged them in ethical reasoning and complex cognitive tasks related to empathy, ethics, and social justice. In the follow-on course, students transitioned from their characters to address similar technical and social issues relevant to sanitation in the developing world. Looking forward to its third iteration, this course offers students opportunities to reflect on social justice and ethical issues while developing the qualities of compassion and empathy. This paper discusses our classroom activities and the ethical learning outcomes they produce. Course assessments employed a mixed-methods, triangulated approach that addressed several learning outcomes, including those related to ethics and social justice. Indirect instruments included standardized university course evaluations and a pre/post open prompt survey. Direct methods included student course work samples (a variety of written work, posters, presentations and final projects), a pre/post analysis of a scenario involving a hazardous chemical and a video-recorded session of teams analyzing an ambiguous scene indirectly related to course content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]