Telling our stories: benefits to student panelists

Stephens et al. [1] recently demonstrated that a special form of a student panel, DifferenceEducation Intervention (DEI), closed the achievement gap between first-generation students and continuing-generation students while improving key psychosocial indicators for all students. The questions posed to the DEI panelists prompt them to discuss how their social-class backgrounds affect their college experiences. Inspired by this work, we introduced a DEI panel activity into several sections of a first-year seminar class for engineering students. In this paper, we will describe an unexpected benefit of the DEI activity, namely its impact on the students who served on the panels. Some panelists reported that it was helpful to hear the experiences of their fellow panelists, which consequently bolstered diversity awareness. Some panelists benefitted from the self-reflection necessary to describe their experiences to the audience of first-year students.