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1. Shaping the macro-ethical reasoning of engineers through deliberate cultural practices

   Radoff, J. ; Turpen, C. A. ; Tomblin, D. ; Mogul, N. F. ; Agrawal, A. ; Elby, A. ( June 2023 , Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland)

   Most engineering ethics education is segregated into particular courses that, from a student’s perspective, can feel disconnected from the technical education at the center of their programs. In part because of this disconnect, several immersive programs designed to train engineering students in socio-technical systems thinking have emerged in the U.S. in the past two decades. One pedagogical goal of these programs is to provide alternative ideologies and practices that counter dominant cultural paradigms that marginalize macroethical thinking and social justice perspectives in engineering schools. In theory, longer-term immersion in such programs can help students overcome these harmful ideologies. However, because of the difficult nature of studying cultural change, very few studies have attempted to provide a thick description of how these alternative cultural practices are influencing student perspectives on engineering practices. Our study offers a rare glimpse at student uptake of these practices in a multi-year Science, Technology, and Society (STS) living-learning program. Our study explores whether and how cultural practices within an STS program help students develop and sustain the resources for using a socio-technical systems thinking approach to engineering practice. We grounded our work in a cultural practices framework from Nasir and Kirshner [1] which roughly understands practice to be “a patterned set of actions performed by members of a group based on common purposes and expectations, with shared cultural values, tools, and meanings” ([2, p. 99] as cited in [3]). Our descriptions of collective enactments of cultural practices are grounded in accounts of classroom events from researcher fieldnotes and reflections in student interviews. Looking across the enactment of practices in classrooms and students’ interpretations of these events in interviews allows us to describe the multiplicity of meanings that students distill from these activities. This paper will present on multiple cultural practices salient to students we have identified in this STS community, for example: cultivating an ethics of care, making the invisible visible, understanding systems from multiple perspectives, and empowering students to develop moral stances as citizens and scientists/engineers in society. Because of the complexity of the interplay between the scaffolding of the STS program’s pedagogy and the emergence of these four themes, we chose to center “cultivating an ethics of care” in this analysis and relationally explore the other three themes through it. Ethics of care manifests in two basic ways in the data. Students talk about how an ethics of care is part of the STS program community and how the STS program fosters the need for an ethics of care toward communities outside the classroom through human-centered engineering design. 

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2. Tactics of Soft Resistance in User Experience Professionals' Values Work

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3479499  

   Wong, Richmond Y. ( October 2021 , Proceedings of the ACM on humancomputer interaction)

   null (Ed.)

   User experience (UX) professionals' attempts to address social values as a part of their work practice can overlap with tactics to contest, resist, or change the companies they work for. This paper studies tactics that take place in this overlap, where UX professionals try to re-shape the values embodied and promoted by their companies, in addition to the values embodied and promoted in the technical systems and products that their companies produce. Through interviews with UX professionals working at large U.S.-based technology companies and observations at UX meetup events, this paper identifies tactics used towards three goals: (1) creating space for UX expertise to address values; (2) making values visible and relevant to other organizational stakeholders; and (3) changing organizational processes and orientations towards values. This paper analyzes these as tactics of resistance: UX professionals seek to subvert or change existing practices and organizational structures towards more values-conscious ends. Yet, these tactics of resistance often rely on the dominant discourses and logics of the technology industry. The paper characterizes these as partial or "soft" tactics, but also argues that they nevertheless hold possibilities for enacting values-oriented changes. 

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3. User vs. Engineer: Student Perceptions of Responsibility in Social Media

   Stepback, L. ; Hwang, M. H. ; Claussen, S. ; Leonardo, Y. ( June 2023 , ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Engineers are responsible to many stakeholders, including the public and their employer. One such responsibility is considering and accounting for the potential impacts and risks associated with a technology that they create. A relatively new, and potentially risky, technology that has been on the rise over the past two decades is social media. The advent of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, and its integration into our daily lives raises questions about the duty engineers bear for its responsible usage and design versus the responsibilities users have as they use the technology. This paper analyzes qualitative interview data from a study on engineering students’ perceptions of engineering ethics and social responsibility to answer the following research question: In what ways do students change (or not change) how they talk about engineers’ social and professional responsibilities to the technologies they create when framed in the context of social media? Our findings show that mentioning social media as a specific application of engineering ethics rendered visible the relationship between engineers, users, and technology that students then utilized to address the broader question about engineers’ responsibility to the technologies they create. In this study, a total of 33 students from three U.S. universities were interviewed longitudinally, once in the first year of their degree and again in the fourth year. In the interviews, the students were asked about their views on the social and professional duties engineers have for the technologies they create, framed in the context of social media. Analysis of student responses involved open and axial coding of relevant interview portions performed by two researchers to identify common themes and longitudinal changes between student interviews. These themes included: communication between the engineer and user, collective responsibility, benefits to society, high quality engineering, and misinformation. While students typically maintained elements of their views across both interviews, it was also common to see students change their responses to include new themes or exclude themes present in their initial interview. The students tended to believe that engineers have a responsibility to think through potential uses (or misuses) of their technology, but also believe that the users share some responsibility to use the technology appropriately. When social media was mentioned specifically, some students believed that the users were entirely responsible for how the technology is used, occasionally contradicting their views of engineering ethics when probed without the context of social media. This paper highlights the central tension between user responsibility and engineer responsibility. By illuminating students’ views, it will support educators in opening a dialogue with their students about who is ultimately responsible for the design and use of new technologies. 

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4. When Am I (N)ever Going to Use This? How Engineers Use Algebra

   Istas, Brooke ; Walkington, Candace ; Leyva, Elizabeth ( July 2021 , 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   Mathematics is an important tool in engineering practice, as mathematical rules govern many designed systems (e.g., Nathan et al., 2013; Nathan et al., 2017). Investigations of structural engineers suggest that mathematical modelling is ubiquitous in their work, but the nature of the tasks they confront is not well-represented in the K-12 classroom (e.g., Gainsburg, 2006). This follows a larger literature base suggesting that school mathematics is often inauthentic and does represent how mathematics is used in practice. At the same time, algebra is a persistent gatekeeper to careers in engineering (e.g., Harackiewicz et al., 2012; Olson & Riordan, 2012). In the present study, we interviewed 12 engineers, asking them a series of questions about how they use specific kinds of algebraic function (e.g., linear, exponential, quadratic) in their work. The purpose of these interviews was to use the responses to create mathematical scenarios for College Algebra activities that would be personalized to community college students’ career interests. This curriculum would represent how algebra is used in practice by STEM professionals. However, our results were not what we expected. In this paper, we discuss three major themes that arose from qualitative analyses of the interviews. First, we found that engineers resoundingly endorsed the importance of College Algebra concepts for their day-to-day work, and uniformly stated that math was vital to engineering. However, the second theme was that the engineers struggled to describe how they used functions more complex than linear (i.e., y=mx+b) in their work. Students typically learn about linear functions prior to College Algebra, and in College Algebra explore more complex functions like polynomial, logarithmic, and exponential. Third, we found that engineers rarely use the explicit algebraic form of an algebraic function (e.g., y=3x+5), and instead rely on tables, graphs, informal arithmetic, and computerized computation systems where the equation is invisible. This was surprising, given that the bulk of the College Algebra course involves learning how to use and manipulate these formal expressions, learning skills like factoring, simplifying, solving, and interpreting parameters. We also found that these trends for engineers followed trends we saw in our larger sample where we interviewed professionals from across STEM fields. This study calls into question the gatekeeping role of formal algebraic courses like College Algebra for STEM careers. If engineers don’t actually use 75% of the content in these courses, why are they required? One reason might be that the courses are simply outdated, or arguments might be made that learning mathematics builds more general modelling and problem-solving skills. However, research from educational psychology on the difficulty of transfer would strongly refute this point – people tend to learn things that are very specific. Another reason to consider is that formal mathematics courses like advanced algebra have emerged as a very convenient mechanism to filter people by race, gender, and socioeconomic background, and to promote the maintenance of the “status quo” inequality in STEM fields. This is a critical issue to investigate for the future of the field of engineering as a whole. 

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5. Mentoring Approaches that Support Minoritized STEM Undergraduates: A Pilot Study (EBR)

   Bork, S.J. ; Clarke, N. ; Mondisa, J.-L. ( January 2022 , Proceedings of the Annual American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Conference)

   This work presents the research methods and preliminary results from a pilot study that assesses mentoring approaches used to support racially minoritized students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. There is a national imperative to broaden participation of racially minoritized undergraduates in STEM fields as evidenced by reports and the recent calls for social justice and equity in these fields. In STEM, mentoring has been recognized as a mechanism that can help to support racially minoritized student populations (e.g., persons who identify as Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and American Indian/Alaskan Native). Yet for mentors in higher education, minimal examples exist that detail effective mentoring approaches, strategies, and competencies that support the persistence and success of minoritized mentees in STEM. In better understanding mentoring approaches, we can make visible how to better mentor these populations and help to employ more equitable mentoring participation. The research question guiding this study is: What approaches are used by mentors who help racially minoritized undergraduate mentees persist in STEM fields? Mentoring literature and two theoretical frameworks were leveraged to situate these mentoring experiences. Intersectionality theory is used to explore the role of compounding minoritized identities within the power contexts (i.e., structural, hegemonic, disciplinary, and interpersonal) of higher education. Community cultural wealth is also used as a lens to examine six forms of capital (i.e., family, social, navigational, aspirational, resistant, and linguistic) that may be used in mentoring practices with minoritized students. This paper will present the methods and findings from the pilot study, centering on the development of the team’s interview protocol. This work will provide insights about the piloting process of a larger study as well as initial emergent themes about the approaches and experiences of mentors who mentor minoritized undergraduate students in STEM. 

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