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Abstract Background Civil engineers design systems that have the potential to impact existing oppressive societal conditions. Critical action—the ability to recognize and act against oppressive conditions—is an obligation for civil engineers committed to building a more just world.
Purpose/Hypothesis History reveals that civil engineers often do not take critical action and accrediting bodies (e.g., ABET) have responded by creating requirements to consider social factors and contexts. Considering these endeavors, we ask: To what extent do civil engineering students demonstrate critical action attitudes when prompted by engineering problem‐solving? In what ways does culturally relevant problem‐solving influence critical action attitudes?
Design/Method Employing transformative action as a theoretical framework, we assessed students' responses to a design question on three levels that perpetuate or disrupt oppression (avoidant, destructive, and critical action). The empirical study used qualitative and quantitative analysis to examine survey responses of 375 civil engineering undergraduate students across 12 US universities.
Results The results showed that engineering students largely avoided discussing taking critical action, remaining focused on technical and nontechnical factors that evaded acknowledgement of sociopolitical factors. Nevertheless, when exposed to culturally relevant problem‐solving, students showed a statistically significant increase in both critical and destructive action responses.
Conclusions We posit that students' exposure to culturally relevant problem‐solving can enhance students' critical action attitudes. The results call on the need for civil engineering educators to cultivate culturally relevant problem‐solving in civil engineering curriculum.
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Free, publicly-accessible full text available May 1, 2024
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In February 2021, severe winter weather in Texas caused widespread electrical blackouts, water outages, and boil water notices. Water systems faced extensive challenges due to cascading failures across multiple interde- pendent infrastructure systems. Water utilities have since made considerable progress in improving resilience to extreme events, but ongoing challenges remain. Through a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with 20 large water utilities in Texas, this study tracks the evolution of water infrastructure resilience across three phases: the storm and immediate aftermath, the subsequent one-year period, and the “new normal” in the post-disaster environment. We consider five dimensions of resilience—economic, environmental, governance, infrastructure, and social—to identify where solutions have been implemented and where barriers remain. This study contributes to efforts throughout the United States to build more robust water systems by capturing lessons learned from Winter Storm Uri and providing recommendations to improve hazard preparedness, resilience, and public health.more » « less
