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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. 

“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. 

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?