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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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Collaborative Ethnography and Matters of Care in Counterspaces
This paper offers a reflexive analysis of an interdisciplinary and cross-race collaboration to advance equity in engineering called LATTICE (Launching Academics on the Tenure-Track: an Intentional Community in Engineering). We engage two bodies of scholarship—matters of care in feminist science and technology studies (STS) and critical race theory on counterspaces—to theorize on the data infrastructure and narrative practices that we developed when applying critical methodologies to collective action in technoscience. We discuss how our care practices conflicted with traditional ethnographic practices and thus, inspired us to innovate on methods. These methods—member-checking and polyvocal memo-ing—make transgressing the boundaries of LATTICE counterspaces for public dissemination possible by invoking caring as praxis. We conclude that using these methods to discuss the contradictions and challenges in STS collaborations is an opportunity for advancing mutual intelligibility among interdisciplinary scholars and a politics of knowledge production grounded in values of care and friendship that may contribute to equity and justice in technoscience.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2409905
- PAR ID:
- 10511243
- Publisher / Repository:
- Engaging Science, Technology, andSociety
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Engaging Science, Technology, and Society
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2413-8053
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Collaborative research between scholars of science and technology studies (STS)and scholars of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is a growing trend. The papers assembled in thisSpecial Section offer both embodied and empirical knowledge on how ethnographers negotiate our roles in integrative research when constrained by what our technoscientific collaborators value, what funders demand, what our home institutions expect, what we want to learn from the worlds we study, and the social transformations we envision in science and society. We grapple with how we as ethnographers can best balance caring for the communities we study, the ones we serve, and the ones we identify with. We take care that knowledge making is political. Race, gender, class, and ability status of scholars intersect with the organizational, institutional, and cultural contexts in which we practice science to shape and be shaped by entrenched power relations.Through a feminist politics of care, this collection transforms tensions in interdisciplinary collaborations into resources that enlarge our understandings of what these collaborations are like for STS ethnographers, make visible certain labors within them and, crucially, enrich our vision for what we want these collaborations to be.more » « less
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“A culture of disengagement” is what Erin Cech [1, see also 4,9] has named the phenomenon that, within engineering schools, students graduate with less interest in societal issues than when they arrive. Much of this disengagement is attributed to mindsets ([2]: centrality of military and corporate organizations, uncritical acceptance of authority, technical narrowness, positivism and the myth of objectivity) and ideologies ([1]: technical-social dualism, depoliticization, meritocracy) that create a socio-technical divide that encourages many students to marginalize social issues related to engineering. In recent years, some scholars have proposed ways to overcome this disengagement, for example Jon Leydens and Juan Lucena’s (2018) “Engineering for Social Justice Criteria.” However, little research has been conducted to trace how engineering students are taking up these programs. This paper builds on an NSF-funded ethnographic study of cultural practices in a Science, Technology, and Society (STS) program that serves 1st and 2nd year engineering students [6, 22- 23]. That research study sought to answer: How does this program cultivate engineering students' macro-ethical reasoning about science and technology? Radoff and colleagues [6] identified four salient ways that students described the cultural practices of the STS program: 1) cultivating an ethics of care, 2) making the invisible visible, 3) understanding systems from multiple perspectives, and 4) empowering students to develop moral stances as engineers in society (developing a sense of agency). This paper builds off of insights uncovered from Radoff et al by zooming in on the ways students describe how their sense of agency manifests during their time in the program. On top of interview and focus group data, we draw examples from STS student participant observations in STS courses [27]. We use examples drawn from this data to reflect on how encouraging student agency can help overcome the socio-technical divide.more » « less
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“A culture of disengagement” is what Erin Cech [1, see also 4,9] has named the phenomenon that, within engineering schools, students graduate with less interest in societal issues than when they arrive. Much of this disengagement is attributed to mindsets ([2]: centrality of military and corporate organizations, uncritical acceptance of authority, technical narrowness, positivism and the myth of objectivity) and ideologies ([1]: technical-social dualism, depoliticization, meritocracy) that create a socio-technical divide that encourages many students to marginalize social issues related to engineering. In recent years, some scholars have proposed ways to overcome this disengagement, for example Jon Leydens and Juan Lucena’s (2018) “Engineering for Social Justice Criteria.” However, little research has been conducted to trace how engineering students are taking up these programs. This paper builds on an NSF-funded ethnographic study of cultural practices in a Science, Technology, and Society (STS) program that serves 1st and 2nd year engineering students [6, 22- 23]. That research study sought to answer: How does this program cultivate engineering students' macro-ethical reasoning about science and technology? Radoff and colleagues [6] identified four salient ways that students described the cultural practices of the STS program: 1) cultivating an ethics of care, 2) making the invisible visible, 3) understanding systems from multiple perspectives, and 4) empowering students to develop moral stances as engineers in society (developing a sense of agency). This paper builds off of insights uncovered from Radoff et al by zooming in on the ways students describe how their sense of agency manifests during their time in the program. On top of interview and focus group data, we draw examples from STS student participant observations in STS courses [27]. We use examples drawn from this data to reflect on how encouraging student agency can help overcome the socio-technical divide.more » « less
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This research article is a collaborative set of reflections and provocations stemming from the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded workshop on STS as a Critical Pedagogy, hosted online during the summer of 2021 by Shannon N. Conley and Emily York at James Madison University. The workshop occurred over four separate sessions, bringing together forty participants (including six undergraduate students who contributed as both facilitators and research assistants). Participants self-organized into panels, leading the workshop collective to engage a host of questions, challenges, methods, and practices related to STS and critical pedagogy. Questions included the following. What characterizes critical STS pedagogies? How are critical STS pedagogies enabled and constrained by our institutional and disciplinary locations? What makes STS pedagogies travel? How might we imagine STS pedagogies otherwise? How do our pedagogies shape our research and engagement in the world? How might we critically interrogate the boundaries between research, teaching, service, and engagement, and what becomes visible when we do so?more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.2049
