Cal Poly San Luis Obispo recently received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
The grant’s purpose is to fund the five-year “breaking the binary project” at Cal Poly, which launched in June 2023. The project seeks to make radical changes to the training of undergraduate engineering students and reimagine the department’s curriculum and physical spaces.
A release by Cal Poly News says this will be done through workshops, dialogue and critical mentoring, studying the perceptions and beliefs in the department, and use this to shift the learning space to promote increased equity, diversity, and inclusivity. The grant team will also explore ways to deepen relationships between students, staff, and faculty.
The department chair, Lynn Slivovsky, said “We want to make the department a better place for students, faculty and staff of different races, genders, sexual orientations, and abilities, among other social identities.”
