Dr. Gilda Barabino on Olin College’s Powerful Learning Environments

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The next cohort kicks off February 3rd, 2022. So what are you waiting for? Learn more and register at the link in the show notes. Alright, let’s listen in. Oh, before we start, Gilda, do you have a favorite poet?

Well, one of my favorite authors for poetry short stories and novels is Langston Hughes. And one of the reasons why I really love Langston Hughes is because he was able to look at ourselves as a community and find laughter, find ways to humanize but lighten the heavy loads. So he’s always been my favorite. Oh, I love that.

We try to start all of our meetings and sessions and webinars with poetry. So we’ll bust out some Langston Hughes next time. Alright, let’s get started. Dr. Gilda Barbino, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Thank you so much for having me.

You’ve been at Olin College now for about a year and a half and you’re back in person this semester. Yay. Yay. What does learning look like at Olin College? It’s fascinating in so many ways because we’re returning this year after having been remote and being remote in a

situation where our hallmark is in-person learning, collaborative teams. We are centered on the interactions, the direct interactions between faculty and students and students with students. So having been in a remote situation where you’re trying to capture as best as you can the in-person dynamics in a remote virtual setting. And then to come back in after you had made as many adjustments as you could. Like we did things like send kits across the country and across the world so that we could work on projects together even in a virtual setting.

Now we’re back and we’re seeing the power of the human connection, but also trying to make the adjustments of re-engaging and capturing the essence of Olin, capturing the essence of that team spirit. It turns out it’s like riding the bike. You get back on and you don’t forget it, but there is an adjustment. We also learned that it is absolutely valuable to have that kind of interaction that there’s no substitute for by being together in groups, peer to peer,

peer to faculty, students with staff. That kind of learning and that engaged environment has been fantastic. So that’s what we’ve been experiencing. I love those pictures. I often describe those first learning experiences at Olin College.

There’s a lot of maker activities that happen right from day one, often in teams, often jumping into really difficult problems that learners may not have ever, ever experienced before. So I love the hands-on, applied, team-based learning that happens on your campus. Well, it’s fantastic. And you’re right that it starts day one.

Like one of our first classes is called Design Nature. And to see all of the first year students work on a project where they’re literally mimicking nature in their designs in a collaborative way, it’s just fantastic. And there’s no better way to get started. I walked into that class two years ago and the professor said there was a pile of rubber bands and cardboard on the table and he said, make jumping animals go.

It was a beautiful assignment. It was quick and just the room lit up in a beautiful way. What a cool way to start a class. Hey, you’re listening to the Getting Spark Podcast. I’m Tom Van Deric.

And today we have the pleasure of being joined by Dr. Gilda Barabino. She is the president at Olin College. It’s a beautiful demonstration site. It’s a small school west of Boston. And as mentioned, Gilda’s been there for about a year and a half.

Dr. Barabino is also a professor of biomedical and chemical engineering. And she most recently served as the dean at City College in New York City. Dr. Barabino, it’s really great to have you here. I wish I could be there in person visiting with you and your students. Well, that time will come.

You have an open invitation. As I mentioned before we started recording, I hated chemistry and engineering school. I wonder what the hook was for you. Was it the subject or a person? So it was, but you know, I have to tell you, it’s not what someone might think.

I did not know what I wanted to major in for college, for example. And one of the things that I thought, well, if I knew what profession I wanted to follow, then I’d have a sense of what I wanted to major in, if I didn’t know. But I’ll tell you how I picked chemistry, actually. In high school, the chemistry teacher, I felt encouraged the boys to do chemistry

and not the girls, not the women. And so that was my entree. Like that’s why I was intrigued. Like, why is it that you would not encourage women to pursue chemistry? So I’m going to pursue it.

That’s literally why I started to follow chemistry and major in chemistry at the college level and then later thought about what I would do with it. So Gilda, when you went to Rice and enrolled in the PhD program, there probably weren’t a lot of black women in that program, right? Right. That’s right.

So for me, one of the reasons why I chose chemical engineering is because I wanted something that was more applied. I had a background in chemistry. Engineering would be applied. So hence chemical engineering.

When I entered Rice in 1981, I was the first African-American who had ever been admitted to the graduate program in chemical engineering. So I learned a lot quickly about solo status and the kinds of isolation and margin marginalization that comes with that. But it also helped directly on a path of trying to open doors for others.

What was attractive to you about Olin College? I have to tell you what was so attractive to me about Olin College was the alignment between what Olin is and stands for and my own personal and professional objectives. So for example, for me, as you can tell from my path, I don’t mind being a trailblazer. I don’t mind thinking about how do we do things differently?

What is transformative in engineering education, for example? And Olin was established to do just that, to transform engineering education. At its founding, Olin also was established to have gender parity. So it started out with accepting classes where it would be 50-50 between men and women. Olin also used this concept of team-based learning, project-based learning,

students at the center and applying engineering to real world problems, all of which attracted me. So the alignment could not be more perfect and I could be more excited about leading an institution like Olin. We talked about stepping into the job in an incredibly difficult period. That must have been trial by fire, right?

It was absolutely trial by fire. It was like joining an institution in a year like no other. So I had all of these things in mind before I got to Olin of how I was going to be immersed in that team-based learning and I was going to be immersed in this community where students were at the center and part of what we did was all about those

engagements of building relationships. And voila, we’re remote. And to really try to gain that community essence and be part of a community in a remote setting is challenging in and of itself. But I have to tell you, I think that it allowed me to see Olin in different ways,

ways which I had already imagined, but ways that I couldn’t even possibly imagine. And it allowed me to work with the community to help us see ourselves in ways we couldn’t have imagined, which is goes to say that the future that we want to reinvent ourselves, we want to be constant innovators and constant contributors. So how do you do that?

And the pandemic and the setting actually gave us more of an opportunity to reexamine what does change look like? What does innovation look like? You thought you knew, but now let’s really be creative. I think a 2018 MIT study came out and said,

Olin was the most well regarded school of engineering on the planet. What do you suspect the points of distinction are that earn that honor? Yeah, I think there are many points of distinction and part of it is this willingness to do things differently. Part of it is working totally across disciplines and breaking down boundaries and barriers. So we don’t have departments.

We don’t award tenure. We’re totally interdisciplinary. So that concept in and of itself allows a certain level of agility, our size, the idea that we’re set up to experiment, to prototype, to change, to try new things in ways that you might not normally think of.

And to show that that actually allows you to develop and prepare future engineers who are equipped in such new and exciting ways to solve these kinds of complex challenges that are facing us, that are only going to get more complex. My last book was called Difference Making at the Heart of Learning. And the section on college is featured, Olin, because you’re a school that’s really committed

to making the world a better place and empowering your learners to make a difference. And maybe you could describe some of the work that seniors do in projects that really try to deliver value for a community. Sure. And actually this concept and the desire and the mission for public good,

the mission towards social justice and making the world a better place was part of what drew me to Olin as well. And so our students, especially at their senior year when we do capstone design projects, we have many opportunities for them, some of which are totally directed towards social justice. So one example would be affordable design entrepreneurship, where the whole point is

to engage the users, the end users, with the students working on these projects that have their end goal is to create some design or product or device or technology for underserved communities. And the idea that you can do low cost solutions that are serviceable and reachable and accessible to underserved populations as your goal is fantastic in using those

that you are trying to serve as part of the learning process, learning from them for the design works fabulously. And we have this other concept that we just call user oriented collaborative design. So this idea of like you actually engage those that you are trying to design for and you center their voices and make them part of the design process.

So those activities I think are really part of what makes us who we are and helps make the world a better place. You’re also known for helping other colleges get better. You’ve had thousands of visitors over the year. What’s the current agenda in terms of helping other colleges improve?

So we are small and we graduate a small number of students. But one way for us to really have impact and increase our footprint is by bringing others in and sharing with them our ways of thinking doing, sharing with them pedagogy and how do we get to these different approaches to learning. And just honestly the sharing of how Olin goes about its curriculum,

how Olin engages the students, how Olin engages the users has been such a gift to others who want to adapt. So the idea is not necessarily that they go off and become an Olin. They learn from these different ways of doing at Olin and see how they can adapt that in their own organizations so that they can then train better equipped engineers themselves.

Is one of those ways a summer institute? Is that what you call it? Yeah. So we, so for summer institute, a group from an institution will come and work directly with our faculty and learn techniques and strategies that they can bring back to their institutions.

But importantly, while they’re here learning, they are actually participating in doing designs themselves as a group. So it’s hands on learning that they can then take back to their own organizations. And Dr. Bairabino, I also appreciate your leadership in the Keen Network. That’s about 50 of America’s best engineering schools that work together

to embed the entrepreneurial mindset in their programs as engineeringunleashed.com. If you want to learn more, but Olin’s been a real leader in that program since the beginning. And I think our leadership in that space is, again, back to why we were founded and what were some of our founding goals, which part of that was how do you integrate liberal arts, entrepreneurship and engineering for social good and public good.

And it’s that integration that really allows us to do things in new and different ways. So to be able to share that with others who are seeing that combination as a path forward because, frankly, we can’t separate social from technical. And we are doing engineering for people. We are people engineering for people.

So to combine all of that. And I don’t think we’re trained well if we are solely focusing on technical without social. If we don’t sharpen our skills in arts as well as engineering, for example, social science, as well as technical science, it’s bringing all of that together. That’s actually going to make us all stronger.

I’d love to learn about the equity agenda. Let’s start at Olin and then talk about America and how we help more. Women and historically marginalized groups move into engineering. But let’s start with Olin. You mentioned that the school was founded with gender equity.

So there was an equity component at the at the founding. But what have you found and what are you working on from an equity standpoint? Sure. So in that founding and bringing in diverse teams that consisted of women and men, we learned a lot about the power of having diverse teams. So we also learned that it’s not just gender diversity.

There are all sorts of diversity that we should be looking at, including racial and ethnic and LGBTQ. I mean, there are multiple forms of diversity, diversity of thought. But how do we bring all that together? We also know that the young people in particular are drawn to a discipline like engineering, where you can use engineering to make a difference in the world.

And people want to make a difference. People want to have a sense of purpose and how they’re going to use their training in the future and have impact. So bringing that all together, one of the things that we’re really interested in at Olin for the future, how do we make engineering so that it is for everyone?

We feel strongly that engineering must be for everyone. And this idea that we can bring in populations, regardless of background, and make engineering accessible, affordable, we can contribute to who gets to be an engineer and broaden that. We can broaden the definition of engineering and what it means to be an engineer

and what it means to be impactful as an engineer. And in doing so, we can actually stay true to our own mission about public good and social justice. So that’s some of the directions that we’re moving in for the future. I appreciate that. And more broadly, nationally, what should we be working on to encourage girls

and historically marginalized groups to succeed in engineering? So one of the things that I think is really important is for everyone to be able to see what you can do with engineering. So this idea of understanding real-world problems and so that you’re learning by doing, that alone is an attractor.

And if you use that as an attractor and recognize that it’s not a gatekeeper, it should be a way to bring people in and be inclusive about how you’re bringing people into the field, not excluding, not gatekeeping, but saying, this is open to everyone and this is a draw. So that’s some of the things that we’re thinking about for the future. The other thing that I think is really important when we think about diversity,

equity, and inclusion more broadly across all of higher education is this concept of looking at systems, looking at cultures and environments. Because often what happens, we focus on the individual and we say an individual has an asset or does not have an asset. But it’s all about how do you contort the individual.

I would posit that how do you create cultures and environments and systems that would support anyone? And part of what I think is magical about Olin is that it’s very community-based. It’s very much centered on the students. It’s very much about how do you create an environment that supports everyone’s success. So even for us, part of our success will be broadening how we bring people in.

And we can demonstrate for others and be the leaders and this is how you do it. This is how you create that culture and environment. This is how you broaden the definition. This is how you make it more accessible and inclusive to bring people in. That’s our mission.

And I think that should be everyone’s mission to some extent. Let’s talk about the path forward for a minute. One thing I’d really appreciate about Olin is that you’ve done a beautiful job of incorporating computing and data science across the curriculum. What else are you working on as you think about the next few years?

Sure. I think it’s really important as we think about what are the most vexing problems for the world right now. So we really are thinking about climate change, sustainability, health and global health and well-being.

So if we focus on those areas in particular, how do we use engineering and again we are crossing disciplines and bringing together like an anthropologist with an engineer, an artist with an engineer. But how do we do that in a way that we really are starting to tackle those big issues that are just going to be there?

And part of what we’re trying to do in dealing with those issues as well is use an equity lens. So like looking at sustainability in the service of equity, we know that certain areas are disproportionately impacted by environmental changes. So that kind of thing that you actually use your talents in the way you’re constructed so that you are tackling the issues of the day with the tools of the day and preparing our

young people to go out there and slay that dragon or those dragons. I love that and I feel that spirit every time I visit the Olin campus. Let’s close with a segment we call one to one. So the first one is what’s one person who really shaped your understanding, your ethics and values? I would say parents for sure.

I know it’s not one person but I’m going to say it as a parental unit. You must have had a strong backbone to thrive at Rice. The fact that you went into engineering because there weren’t any other black women doing it and you were going to do it, Doug, on it, I’d like to meet your mother because I noticed she was a special person.

All right, here’s two insights that I take from your work at Olin. One is just the importance of active learning, real world learning, project-based learning, team-based learning. It’s absolutely critical and stepping into more problem-solving with unknown answers instead of known answers, inviting kids into complexity and using strategies like design thinking.

You’ve just been a great teacher. You’ve helped to show the world that this is what a modern engineering education looks like. We think many tenets of that can begin in Middleton in high school. The second is just your focus on, I call it difference making, but the college just is alive with that ethic of making a difference.

I think it’s why most of your students are not doing it. Making a difference. I think it’s why most of your students go to Olin and I think it’s part of what makes them thrive at Olin. Is there an additional insight for education leaders that you’d want to share?

Well, I do think this idea of meeting the student where they are and letting them be who they are and helping them be their best selves. This, like we all have multiple identities and what we bring to the table, but letting people be in an environment where they can honor all of that and be learners and be educators at the same time and work collectively to do broader good, but also be true to who they are as individuals

as they are also part of the collective and the contribution. So I think that part is important as well in this holistic approach of honoring the whole self, the whole person. What a lovely addition. I think the pandemic really, as you said at the outset, it reminded us of how important it is

to be together, to have places that are safe, belonging, where people feel respected and safe, willing, encouraged to contribute. So I appreciate all those things about Olin. What a treat to meet you virtually. I can’t wait to see you in person.

We’ve been talking to Dr. Gilda Barabino, the second president of the Olin College of Engineering. Gilda, thanks so much for being with us. Thank you so much. It’s been my pleasure.

This is Tom Banderer. You’ve been listening to Getting Smart Podcasts. I want to thank our producer, breadmaker, poet laureate Mason Pasha and the whole Getting Smart team for making this show possible. Keep learning.

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