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Engineering education is increasingly looking to the liberal arts to broaden and diversify preparation of students for professional careers. The present study involves an elective graduate environmental engineering course that incorporated the arts and humanities. The goal of the course was to develop engineers and technical professionals who would become both more appreciative of and better equipped to address technical, ethical, social, and cultural challenges in engineering through the development of critical and reflective thinking skills and reflective practice in their professional work. A reflective writing assignment was submitted by students following each of fourteen course topics in response to the following question: Reflect on how you might want to apply what you learned to your development as a professional and/or to your daily life. Student responses were classified by human coders using qualitative text analytic methods and their classifications were attempted to be learned by a simple machine classifier. The goal of this analysis was to identify and quantify students’ reflections on prospective behaviors that emerged through participation in the course. The analysis indicated that the primary focus of students’ responses was self-improvement, with additional themes involving reflection, teamwork, and improving the world. The results provide a glimpse into how broadening and diversifying the curriculum might shape students’ thinking in directions that are more considerate of their contributions to their profession and society. In the discussion, we consider the findings from the human and machine assessments and suggest how incorporating AI machine methods into engineering provides new possibilities for engineering pedagogy.
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Fostering Reflective Engineers : Outcomes of an Arts- and Humanities-Infused Graduate Course
Engineering education traditionally focuses on technical content and problem-solving, leaving little room in the curriculum to examine broader environmental and sociotechnical impacts of engineering work. However, if engineers wish to have intentional, positive influences on these broader impacts, skills for reflective thinking and ethical decision-making are essential. The arts and humanities can provide important and often neglected perspectives for engineers in developing such skills. In a recent seminar course for civil/environmental engineers, we explored ways of developing these skills through activities including Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), in-class readings & discussions, essay writing, and portfolio assignments. In this paper, we present selected findings from this experimental course. While the class was small, comprised of a dozen graduate students, results were encouraging. For example, findings from qualitative thematic analysis of pre- and post-course essays showed an increase in recognition of the importance of breadth of knowledge and/or perspective. Similarly, pre-post Likert-type survey results showed a statistically significant increase (p<0.005, d=1, n=10) in Contextual Competence, a self-reported measure of ability to anticipate and understand the impacts and constraints of broader contexts on engineering solutions. These findings are preliminary but suggest the course helped students develop capacity for reflection through arts- and humanities-based activities.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1806889
- PAR ID:
- 10111135
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2018 World Engineering Education Forum - Global Engineering Deans Council (WEEF-GEDC)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 6
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/WEEF-GEDC.2018.8629714
