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In the chemical industry, judgements related to process safety hold the potential to lead to process incidents, such as chemical leaks and mechanical failures that can have severe consequences. Many of these judgements require engineers to juxtapose competing criteria including leadership, production, relationships, safety, spending, and time. For such judgements, numerous factors are at play, including our beliefs about ourselves and our intention to behave a particular way. As part of a larger research project funded through the NSF Research in the Formation of Engineers (RFE) program, we are working to investigate: 1) What do engineering students and practitioners believe about how they approach making judgements?, 2) how do they behave when actually making judgements?, 3) what gap, if any, exists between their beliefs and behavior?, and 4) how do they reconcile any gaps between their beliefs and behaviors? After completion of the first year of the project, we have interviewed fourteen senior chemical engineering students about how they believe they will approach process safety judgements in scenarios where they must juxtapose competing criteria. During our initial analysis to characterize students’ espoused beliefs about their approaches towards making process safety judgements, we identified an emergent finding about how they justify these beliefs. We present this emergent finding by answering the research question: How do undergraduate engineering students justify their beliefs about how they will make judgements in process safety contexts? When we asked students to provide reasoning for the beliefs they conveyed about how they will approach process safety judgements, we found that overwhelmingly, students used their lived experiences in different work settings to justify their beliefs. These lived experiences included engineering co-ops, internships, volunteer, and retail work. This emergent finding suggests that students’ lived experiences may be greatly informing their espoused beliefs about how they will approach process safety judgements. This paper will also briefly discuss implications for process safety educators on how they may incorporate lived experiences, or other ways of knowing, so students may develop more robust beliefs about process safety judgements.
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Identifying and disrupting problematic implicit beliefs about engineering held by students in service-learning
Service-learning (SL) is a promising way to engage and support local communities, educate students as holistic citizens and professionals, and strengthen the connection between higher education and society. However, within engineering education, SL as a pedagogy often falls short of reaching its full potential as a transformational pedagogy. To further our understanding of why SL, in the context of engineering, remains limited, this research characterizes: 1) implicit beliefs about engineering in students’ descriptions of their SL experiences, and 2) the ways in which students’ beliefs manifest within the context of SL in engineering. Our data include rich, contextual descriptions of SL experiences, which enabled us to generate insight into students’ implicit beliefs about engineering and how they manifest in SL contexts. We used an inductive, qualitative approach to analyze focus group and interview data. We found that students predominantly draw on three implicit beliefs about engineering when engaged in SL experiences: (1) Engineering is predominantly technical, (2) Engineering requires deliverables or tangible products, and (3) Engineers are the best problem solvers. These beliefs often manifested problematically, such that they promote university-centered and apolitical SL practice, while reinforcing social hierarchy, leading to community exploitation in support of student development. This study produces empirical evidence that such implicit beliefs are a mechanism that limits the potential of SL by hindering community-centric and justice-oriented practice. However, some students demonstrated their ability to disrupt these beliefs, thereby showing the potential for SL as a pedagogy in engineering to surface implicit and counterproductive beliefs about engineering and achieve SL goals. The beliefs that are salient in SL and the concrete ways in which they manifest for students have implications for how SL is practiced in engineering and the experiences of both students and partner communities. These beliefs impact the extent to which the socio-political elements of the service are addressed, the extent to which SL is university- versus community-centric, and the quality and extent to which the engineering solution is aligned with social justice. The implications of these findings lead to recommendations for future research on how engineering educators might explicitly design SL curricula to identify, address, and dismantle problematic beliefs before they manifest in problematic ways in SL contexts.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1821866
- PAR ID:
- 10353919
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International journal for service learning in engineering
- Volume:
- 16
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1555-9033
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1-19
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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In the chemical industry, judgements related to process safety hold the potential to lead to process incidents, such as chemical leaks and mechanical failures that can have severe consequences. Many of these judgements require engineers to juxtapose competing criteria including leadership, production, relationships, safety, spending, and time. For such judgements, numerous factors are at play, including our beliefs about ourselves and our intention to behave a particular way. As part of a larger research project funded through the NSF Research in the Formation of Engineers (RFE) program, we are working to investigate: 1) What do engineering students and practitioners believe about how they approach making judgements?, 2) how do they behave when actually making judgements?, 3) what gap, if any, exists between their beliefs and behavior?, and 4) how do they reconcile any gaps between their beliefs and behaviors? After completion of the first year of the project, we have interviewed fourteen senior chemical engineering students about how they believe they will approach process safety judgements in scenarios where they must juxtapose competing criteria. During our initial analysis to characterize students’ espoused beliefs about their approaches towards making process safety judgements, we identified an emergent finding about how they justify these beliefs. We present this emergent finding by answering the research question: How do undergraduate engineering students justify their beliefs about how they will make judgements in process safety contexts? When we asked students to provide reasoning for the beliefs they conveyed about how they will approach process safety judgements, we found that overwhelmingly, students used their lived experiences in different work settings to justify their beliefs. These lived experiences included engineering co-ops, internships, volunteer, and retail work. This emergent finding suggests that students’ lived experiences may be greatly informing their espoused beliefs about how they will approach process safety judgements. This paper will also briefly discuss implications for process safety educators on how they may incorporate lived experiences, or other ways of knowing, so students may develop more robust beliefs about process safety judgements.more » « less
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In the chemical industry, judgements related to process safety hold the potential to lead to process incidents, such as chemical leaks and mechanical failures that can have severe consequences. Many of these judgements require engineers to juxtapose competing criteria including leadership, production, relationships, safety, spending, and time. For such judgements, numerous factors are at play, including our beliefs about ourselves and our intention to behave a particular way. As part of a larger research project funded through the NSF Research in the Formation of Engineers (RFE) program, we are working to investigate: 1) What do engineering students and practitioners believe about how they approach making judgements?, 2) how do they behave when actually making judgements?, 3) what gap, if any, exists between their beliefs and behavior?, and 4) how do they reconcile any gaps between their beliefs and behaviors? After completion of the first year of the project, we have interviewed fourteen senior chemical engineering students about how they believe they will approach process safety judgements in scenarios where they must juxtapose competing criteria. During our initial analysis to characterize students’ espoused beliefs about their approaches towards making process safety judgements, we identified an emergent finding about how they justify these beliefs. We present this emergent finding by answering the research question: How do undergraduate engineering students justify their beliefs about how they will make judgements in process safety contexts? When we asked students to provide reasoning for the beliefs they conveyed about how they will approach process safety judgements, we found that overwhelmingly, students used their lived experiences in different work settings to justify their beliefs. These lived experiences included engineering co-ops, internships, volunteer, and retail work. This emergent finding suggests that students’ lived experiences may be greatly informing their espoused beliefs about how they will approach process safety judgements. This paper will also briefly discuss implications for process safety educators on how they may incorporate lived experiences, or other ways of knowing, so students may develop more robust beliefs about process safety judgements.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.24908/ijsle.v16i2.14747
