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1. Perspectives of Seven Minoritized Students in a First-Year Course Redesign toward Sociotechnical Engineering Education

   Özkan, D.; Andrews, C. (August 2022, 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   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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2. Board 308: Improving Students’ Sociotechnical Literacy in Engineering

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--46886  

   Danahy, Ethan; Andrews, Chelsea; Cantilina, Kaylla; Cross, Jennifer (June 2024, ASEE Conferences)

   The Improving Students’ Sociotechnical Literacy in Engineering project aims to integrate social justice topics with technical knowledge in a first-year engineering course. The approach involves redesigning an existing intro to computing course with justice-based activities, supported by an Equity Learning Assistant (ELA) program. This program trains upperclass students to facilitate in-class discussions on equity and social justice. The project targets improvements in students' critical sociotechnical literacy and engineering identity. Activities include analyzing ethically complex data sets and developing equity-focused projects, while encouraging students to integrate social, economic, and political dimensions into their engineering work. This initiative spans four years (one pilot year plus three NSF-funded iterations) and involves a multidisciplinary research team of engineers and education researchers. 

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3. Characterizing First-Year Engineering Students’ Priorities and Language Use in Socio-technical Written Reflections

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--48454  

   Cantilina, Kaylla; Andrews, Chelsea; Rahman, Fatima (June 2024, ASEE Conferences)

   Here's a shorter abstract for this introduction: This paper examines efforts to integrate justice perspectives throughout a first-year computing course for engineers, moving beyond traditional approaches that separate technical and social content. Funded by NSF, our redesigned course embeds justice components through weekly sociotechnical labs, readings with written reflections, justice-themed coding projects, and a final project addressing social impacts. This analysis focuses on students' weekly reflections from one course section to understand how they conceptualize bias, differential impacts, and causes of societal outcomes across different topics. Our findings offer insights for educators seeking to center justice in engineering education through integrated reflection activities rather than standalone ethics modules. 

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4. Board 122: Work in Progress: Identity and Positioning of International Students in Sociotechnical Discussions

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--42426  

   Meng, Jingshu; Norton, Hannah; Andrews, Chelsea (June 2023, Annual ASEE Conference and Exhibition)

   Concerns about technocentric undergraduate engineering courses have now become widely disseminated. As a result, universities are diligently working to include more sociotechnical content in formerly purely-technical courses, with the goal of engaging students in recognizing and analyzing the economic, political, and social impacts of technology. In the U.S., many of the focus topics for this sociotechnical content are grounded in a U.S. context, requiring an understanding of the history and current state of racial and economic power structures. While U.S. residents are likely familiar with these structures, it is important to consider how these topics are encountered by international students. This case study on international student experience is part of a larger NSF-funded research project exploring integrating sociotechnical topics in a first-year engineering computing course. The revised course included weekly readings followed by small-group discussions on curriculum-aligned real-world justice topics. This work in progress study analyzes post-course student interviews of six international students of color to understand their experiences in this course. We use a qualitative case study approach to analyze these interviews, drawing heavily from work in identity (e.g., Berhane, Secules, & Onuma, 2020), being careful to take an intersectional lens (e.g., Ross, Capobianco, & Godwin, 2017). We draw heavily from the emergent framework of Learning Race in the U.S. Context (Fries-Britt, Mwangi, & Peralta, 2014). We focus on the unique challenges for international students as they navigate justice discourse in the U.S. context. Our examination of international student interviews illuminated conflicts between international students’ self-identity and what they felt they were expected to know and have experienced. Most first-year international students of color reported strong identities as international students and did not identify as strongly with their racial/ethnic groups. They felt they were lacking U.S. racial context, including both knowledge of the history of U.S. racial relations and lived experiences within these systems. At the same time, there is evidence that other students in the classes positioned the international students of color as experts in racial relations in the U.S., looking to them to share personal experiences or for approval of what other students were sharing. Without essentializing these particular international students’ experiences, we hope to draw attention to the social dynamics encountered during sociotechnical lessons and the potential for marginalization of the international student population. 

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5. How Do Students Take up Notions of Environmental Racism in an Engineering Computational Methods Course?

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--43362  

   Ozkan, Desen; Hampton, Cynthia (June 2023, Annual ASEE Conference and Exhibition)

   Engineering departments have begun to prioritize more computational methods in their disciplines. Across engineering schools, computational methods are taught differently, but traditionally without context. In this study, we have revised an introductory engineering computing course such that students take up social, economic, and political contexts as they are introduced to coding and statistics. These contextual elements take three forms. The first is a weekly assignment where students read, reflect, and discuss various equity and justice-themed articles. The second is four weeklong projects over the semester that require a sociotechnical perspective to complete. Lastly, students complete an open-ended final project that requires attention to equity dimensions in each project step. This paper will examine the students’ responses to the weekly discussion reading on environmental racism. In this study, we focus on one week in which students read and reflected on two articles. One was an article from The Atlantic, titled “A New EPA Report Shows that Environmental Racism is Real” (Newkirk II, 2018). The other was an article from Vox titled, “There’s a clear fix to helping Black communities fight pollution” (Ramirez, 2021). The majority of students in this study are first-years enrolled in the school of engineering. The study takes place at a medium-sized, private, predominantly white institution in the northeast region of the US. Responses were collected across two years of this sociotechnical engineering revision. This study is not intended to compare the two years but to understand the breadth of ideas and responses students have in response to reading and reflecting on the article. Notably, two class sections of the course were revised in year one of the projects (2021), and all five sections of the course were revised in year two (2022). Each section is taught by a different engineering instructor. This study is not intended to compare students across different sections. Instead, through this qualitative thematic analysis, we attend to the different ways students take up and respond to social, political, and economic dimensions that have to do with the environment. 

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