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In this qualitative case study, we explore how first- and second year undergraduate students make space for expansive thinking in their engineering modeling work. We focus on the ways in which one group of five women negotiated the inclusion of different social, political, and economic factors in their design model, particularly energy distribution and transboundary equity. Drawing on discourse analysis methods, we analyzed a small-group in-class discussion and identified five expansive moves that helped the students to make space for rethinking what they could include in their model. These included being explicit about their assumptions and uncertainties and acknowledging task difficulties. 

In this work-in-progress qualitative case study, we explore how first- and second year undergraduate students experience uncertainty when doing expansive thinking in sociotechnical engineering modeling work. For this purpose, we analyze stimulated recall interviews of four students to identify the different ways in which they experienced both relational and epistemological uncertainty during an in-class discussion activity. 

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. 

This Complete Evidence-based Practice paper describes first-year engineering students’ perceptions, and specifically their shifts in those perspectives, towards the role of automation and data science in society as well as the racial implications of how those human-made systems are implemented and deployed. As part of a larger curricular change being made to a first-year engineering course in computation, this paper specifically examines two reflection assignments where students wrote, at different points in the semester (week 2 and week 12), regarding their personal questions and understandings related to the role of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and automation in society and its relationship to systemic racism and racial impact of engineering and technological systems. For analysis, the submissions were compiled, and comparisons of the two moments in the semester were coded and analyzed for thematic commonalities seen in student written responses and the overall progression of students’ thinking. Results showed commonalities among students' initial reactions to the video such as questions surrounding who is responsible for the impact of designed technologies along with a strong ideological separation between humans and machines. Juxtaposed with the week 2 assignments, week 12 findings showed commonalities in students’ progress such as an increased awareness of the complexity of racialized sociotechnical problems, stronger emotional responses, more refined ideas about potential solutions, and realizing the systemic nature of racism. Findings suggest that the students met learning goals regarding an awareness of sociotechnical problems and catalyzed (early) critical thinking on how to address them through engineering. Implications from this work demonstrate that first-year students are capable of wrestling with difficult topics such as racism in technology, while still meeting ABET requirements within the course for data science and coding. 

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. 

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. 

There have been increased calls to include sociotechnical thinking–grappling with issues of power, history, and culture–throughout the undergraduate engineering curriculum. One way this more expansive framing of engineering has been integrated into engineering courses is through in-class discussions. There is a need to understand what students are attending to in these conversations. In particular, we are interested in how students frame and justify their arguments in small-group discussions. This study is part of an NSF-funded research project to implement and study integrating sociotechnical components throughout a first-year computing for engineers course. In one iteration of the revised course, each week students read a news article on a current example of the uneven impacts of technology, then engaged in in-class small-group discussions. In this study, we analyze students’ discourse to answer the research questions: What arguments do students use to argue against the use of a technology? How do these arguments relate to common narratives about technology? In this qualitative case study, we analyzed videorecordings of the small group discussions of two focus groups discussing the use of AI in hiring. We looked closely at the justifications students gave for their stated positions and how they relate to the common narratives of technocracy, free market idealism, technological neutrality, and technological determinism. We found all students in both groups rejected these common narratives. We saw students argue that (1) AI technology does not solve the hiring problem well, (2) it is important to regulate AI, (3) using AI for hiring will stagnate diversity, and (4) using AI for hiring unfairly privileges some groups of people over others. While students in both groups rejected the common narratives, only one group explicitly centered those who are harmed and how this harm would likely occur, and this group did so consistently. The other group managed to consistently reject the narratives using vague, safe language and never explicitly mentioned who is harmed by the technology. As a result, only one group’s discussion was clearly centered on justice concerns. These results have implications for how to scaffold small group sociotechnical discussions, what instructors should attend to during these discussions, and how to support students to orient toward systemic impacts and sustain a focus on justice. 

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. 

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. 

Engineering has historically been positioned as “objective” and “neutral” (Cech, 2014), supporting a technical/social dualism in which “hard” technical skills are valued over “soft” social skills such as empathy and team management (Faulkner, 2007). Disrupting this dualism will require us to transform the way that engineering is taught, to include the social, economic, and political aspects of engineering throughout the curriculum. One promising approach to integrating social and technical is through developing students’ critical sociotechnical literacy, supporting students in coming to “understand the intrinsic and systemic sociotechnical relationship between people, communities, and the built environment” (McGowan & Bell, 2020, p. 981). This work-in-progress study is part of a larger NSF-funded research project that explores integrating sociotechnical topics with technical content knowledge in a first-year engineering computing course. This course has previously focused on teaching students how to code, the basics of data science, and some applications to engineering. The revised course engages students in a series of sociotechnical topics, such as analyzing and interpreting data-based evidence of environmental racism. Each week, students read short articles and write reflections to prepare for in-class small group discussions. Near the end of the semester, students examined the topic of racial bias in medical equipment. Students read two popular news articles that discussed differences in accuracies of pulse oximeter readings for patients with different skin tones. We analyze students’ reflection responses for evidence of their developing sociotechnical literacy along three dimensions: (1) bias, (2) differential impact, and (3) responsibility. This exploratory case study employs thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to analyze the students’ written reflections for this topic. Students reflected on evidence of racial bias and potential causes of bias in the device, how this bias is located in and furthers historical patterns of racism in medicine, and considered who or what might be responsible for either causing or fixing the now-known racial bias.