Engineering has historically been positioned as “objective” and “neutral” (Cech, 2014), supporting a technical/social dualism in which “hard” technical skills are valued over “soft” social skills such as empathy and team management (Faulkner, 2007). Disrupting this dualism will require us to transform the way that engineering is taught, to include the social, economic, and political aspects of engineering throughout the curriculum. One promising approach to integrating social and technical is through developing students’ critical sociotechnical literacy, supporting students in coming to “understand the intrinsic and systemic sociotechnical relationship between people, communities, and the built environment” (McGowan & Bell, 2020, p. 981).
This work-in-progress study is part of a larger NSF-funded research project that explores integrating sociotechnical topics with technical content knowledge in a first-year engineering computing course. This course has previously focused on teaching students how to code, the basics of data science, and some applications to engineering. The revised course engages students in a series of sociotechnical topics, such as analyzing and interpreting data-based evidence of environmental racism. Each week, students read short articles and write reflections to prepare for in-class small group discussions.
Near the end of the semester, students examined the topic of racial bias in medical equipment. Students read two popular news articles that discussed differences in accuracies of pulse oximeter readings for patients with different skin tones. We analyze students’ reflection responses for evidence of their developing sociotechnical literacy along three dimensions: (1) bias, (2) differential impact, and (3) responsibility. This exploratory case study employs thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to analyze the students’ written reflections for this topic. Students reflected on evidence of racial bias and potential causes of bias in the device, how this bias is located in and furthers historical patterns of racism in medicine, and considered who or what might be responsible for either causing or fixing the now-known racial bias.
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Perspectives of Seven Minoritized Students in a First-Year Course Redesign toward Sociotechnical Engineering Education
The social/technical dualism in the engineering curriculum leaves students ill-prepared to tackle real-world technical problems in their social, economic, and political contexts (Cech, 2013; Faulkner, 2007; Trevelan, 2010, 2014). Increasingly, students have expressed the desire for their technical courses to show the interplay between social and technical considerations (Leydens & Lucena, 2017), but they have few opportunities to develop these sociotechnical ways of thinking (i.e., values, attitudes, and skills that integrate the social and technical). Instead, students are left to infer engineering as technically neutral through the instructional decisions that make up an engineering curriculum (Cech, 2013; Trevelan, 2014).
In this study, we focus on how students understand the role of sociotechnical thinking in engineering. Particularly, this study centers seven minoritized students in an introductory engineering computation class who are pursuing an engineering degree. The study takes place at a medium private university in New England. These seven students are from a group of roughly seventy students split between two of the five sections for the course. These two sections were recently revised to include more sociotechnical readings, discussions, and homework facilitated with learning assistants. We are interested in understanding the self-described sense of belonging that these students feel as they relate it to learning about engineering as a sociotechnical field.
While the dualism between engineering's technical and social dimensions has been studied in ASEE LEES papers, articles in Engineering Studies, broader engineering education research, and Science, Technology, and Science publications (e.g., Cech, 2013; Faulkner, 2007; Leydens & Lucena, 2017; Riley, 2017; Wisnioski, 2012), there is a need to connect this vast literature with the similarly extensive research on students' sense of belonging and engineering identity development, specifically for those students who have historically been excluded from engineering. Specifically, we draw on W.E.B. DuBois's notion of a 'double consciousness' from the Souls of Black Folks (1903) as a lens through which to understand how these seven students take on the political, economic, and social dimensions presented to them through a first-year engineering curricular redesign around engineering as sociotechnical.
We note the small-n design of this study (Slaton & Pawley, 2018). The seven interviewed students are gender and racial minorities in engineering. However, we note that they do not represent all minoritized students in engineering, and to respect and elevate their experiences, we take a narrative approach. This study is intended to center the perspectives and experiences of these seven students as they navigate an engineering learning environment. We do not intend for the findings to be generalizable or exhaustive but informative as we think about scaling up the sociotechnical curricular redesign in engineering at this university and more broadly.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2110727
- PAR ID:
- 10417936
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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