Minority students take a special "step" to understand Brazil's cultural contexts
One might say their two-week immersion made a world of difference, yielding lessons about cultures and careers that now shed light on life back in the United States. This was the University’s first international short-term engineering program (STEP-Abroad) course designed especially for students from underrepresented minority groups. As an initiative of the Global Engineering Programs and Partnerships (GEPP) office in collaboration with the Minority Engineering Program (MEP), this course titled “Exploring Diversity and Innovation in Brazil” arose from collaborations with corporations, as well as governmental entities and educational organizations in both North and South America.
All the partners shared a prime goal of Purdue’s College of Engineering — to increase the participation of minority students in a range of courses, involving varied destinations and durations, that cultivate intercultural sensitivities and team approaches for problem-solving worldwide.
“Most of our STEP-Abroad programs have a very small percentage of minority student representation, but that’s on its way to changing,” said H. E. Parker, Ph.D., director of GEPP’s Global Competence Initiative and assistant director of Latin America/Spain Programs. She helped design this course offering insights into cultural and business experiences of diversity in the world’s ninth largest economy.
The itinerary, including visits with engineers and students in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, drew strong interest among underrepresented minorities, and women constituted about 70 percent of the enrollment, raising hopes that international-travel momentum will increase among these groups, according to Parker, a long-time leader in helping Purdue students transcend national boundaries.
There was plenty to learn and to assess in light of U.S.-based experiences from the past, according to students.
“After every company visit, I realized that diversity had a different meaning in Brazil,” said one aspiring engineer, Nicole Jackson. She observed more effort being expended to shrink disparities between men and women in the workplace, with lower priority and greater ambiguity addressing racial identity and discrimination. “As an African American woman pursuing a STEM degree, I know that having more women in the workforce is important, but so is having more people of color,” Jackson said in a recent interview.
For student Brenden Drinkard-McFarland, discoveries he will remember include Brazil’s stark income gap, as seen in the ramshackle favela neighborhoods of Rio, and the culture’s approaches to mixed racial backgrounds; this process of adaptation seemed more nuanced for Brazilians than for Americans. But one subject taught in the STEP-Abroad curriculum has been particularly helpful in thinking about people in both countries, Drinkard-McFarland said in an interview. He cited a guideline that goes beyond the “Golden Rule” regarding respect for individuals’ views of themselves. It’s called the “Platinum Rule”: Treat others the way they want to be treated.
Participants benefited from seeing the interplay of race and class systems of a different country — “how that affects the economy, how that affects lifestyles,” according to Virginia Booth Womack, director of MEP. She was one of four administrative mentors who traveled with the students.
She said this unprecedented STEP-Abroad focus on the experiences of diversity helped to make 2019 a landmark year for intercultural and interpersonal connection-making at Purdue. It was also the 50th anniversary for Women in Engineering and the Black Cultural Center.
The list of partnerships backing the course also testified to the important mission of intercultural competence. Partial funding came from the U.S. Department of State’s “100,000 Strong in the Americas” Innovation Fund grants. That program, sponsored by Exxon Mobil, is the White House’s premiere education initiative for the Western Hemisphere.
Margaret Hegwood, who holds a graduate assistantship with GEPP and has received a prestigious Boren Fellowship for international engineering research, was another member of the Purdue administrative team leading the ten-day excursion through major Brazilian cities. She said she also benefited from the exploration of diversity issues and saw how difficult it is to step back from one country’s social constructs in order to understand others.
“For our students, I know that it was sometimes a very emotional experience,” Hegwood said. “Many of them have experienced racism in a variety of forms themselves” and had to “re-confront these events” in a different country context.
She added that there were many other discoveries and uplifting contacts with young Brazilians. These included meeting with teenage students from the favelas and serving as role models, inspiring the low-income teenagers toward pursuits in engineering. They were part of an outreach program conducted by power generation giant Cummins Corp., one of the companies that hosted the STEP-Abroad class.
Other hosts for visitations with engineers and executives included Brazil’s own electricity distribution company, Energisa. An important additional visit brought the group into conversations with students at Universidad de Campinas, UNICAMP.
The travelers had another Purdue-based leader accompanying them — Tasha Zephirin, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Engineering Education. She is the executive assistant for the National Association of Multicultural Program Advocates and co-coordinator of the Global Engineering Education Collaboratory research group.
Besides the U.S. State Department’s grant-making initiative, sponsors supporting the minority students’ course also included Partners of the Americas, an international non-profit that connects collaborators from various areas of expertise, and another network, the International Education Associations.
Writer: William Schmitt, billgerards@gmail.com