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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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Countering Passive Engagement: STS Postures and Analyzing Student Agency in Everyday Engineering
“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.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1916929
- PAR ID:
- 10529890
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE PEER
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- https://peer.asee.org/47082
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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