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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: IEEE PCS Professional Engineering Communication Series
- Sprache: Englisch
Shows how the engineering curriculum can be a site for rendering social justice visible in engineering, for exploring complex socio-technical interplays inherent in engineering practice, and for enhancing teaching and learning Using social justice as a catalyst for curricular transformation, Engineering Justice presents an examination of how politics, culture, and other social issues are inherent in the practice of engineering. It aims to align engineering curricula with socially just outcomes, increase enrollment among underrepresented groups, and lessen lingering gender, class, and ethnicity gaps by showing how the power of engineering knowledge can be explicitly harnessed to serve the underserved and address social inequalities. This book is meant to transform the way educators think about engineering curricula through creating or transforming existing courses to attract, retain, and motivate engineering students to become professionals who enact engineering for social justice. Engineering Justice offers thought-provoking chapters on: why social justice is inherent yet often invisible in engineering education and practice; engineering design for social justice; social justice in the engineering sciences; social justice in humanities and social science courses for engineers; and transforming engineering education and practice. In addition, this book: * Provides a transformative framework for engineering educators in service learning, professional communication, humanitarian engineering, community service, social entrepreneurship, and social responsibility * Includes strategies that engineers on the job can use to advocate for social justice issues and explain their importance to employers, clients, and supervisors * Discusses diversity in engineering educational contexts and how it affects the way students learn and develop Engineering Justice is an important book for today's professors, administrators, and curriculum specialists who seek to produce the best engineers of today and tomorrow.
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Seitenzahl: 598
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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IEEE Press445 Hoes LanePiscataway, NJ 08854
IEEE Press Editorial BoardTariq Samad, Editor in Chief
Giancarlo Fortino
Xiaoou Li
Ray Perez
Dmitry Goldgof
Andreas Molisch
Linda Shafer
Don Heirman
Saeid Nahavandi
Mohammad Shahidehpour
Ekram Hossain
Jeffrey Nanzer
Zidong Wang
ENGINEERING JUSTICE
Transforming Engineering Education and Practice
Jon A. LeydensJuan C. Lucena
IEEE PCS Professional Engineering Communication Series
Copyright © 2018 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
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ISBN: 978-1-118-75730-7
Cover Design: Kristina Robbins, KO Illustrations, www.digistrations.comCover Images: (Man with prosthetic leg, jumping in Patagonia) Eric Rodolfo Schroeder © 123FR.com; (Girl walking through city rubble in Gunkanjima, Nagasaki, Japan) Jordy Meow; (Metal texture with gears) Designed by Kjpargeter/Freepik; (Pure mathematics formulae blackboard) Wallpoppers.com
For the next generation of engineers, in whose minds, hearts, and hands rests the future of transforming engineering education and practice.
For William (“Bill”) G. McBride, mentor, gifted and inspiring professor, and friend—who gave me a life-long ideal to which to aspire.
And for my family—Lorella, Chris, and Kiara—who every day give me hope, challenge, and joy.
—Jon A. Leydens
For my parents—Ernesto, Gloria, and Humberto—who taught me the art of politics, to love and respect the poor, and to tinker like an engineer.
—Juan C. Lucena
Contents
A Note From the Series Editor
About The Authors
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
References
Introduction
1 Pressing Issues for Engineering Education and the Engineering Profession
2 Research Methods
3 Theoretical Frameworks
4 Engineering for Social Justice
5 Engineering for Social Justice Criteria
6 Guidelines for Engineering for Social Justice Implementation
7 Further Chapters
8 Benefits of E4SJ Approach
References
1 Social Justice is Often Invisible in Engineering Education and Practice
1.1 Generic Barriers to Rendering Social Justice Visible
1.2 Engineering-Specific Barriers to Rendering Social Justice Visible: Ideologies
1.3 Engineering-Specific Barriers to Rendering Social Justice Visible: Mindsets
References
2 Engineering Design for Social Justice
2.1 Why Engineering Design Matters
2.2 Engineering for Social Justice: Criteria for Engineering Design Initiatives
2.3 Social Justice Criteria Combined
2.4 Benefits of Integrating SJ in Design
2.5 Limitations of Social Justice Criteria
Appendix 2.A Engineering for Social Justice Self-Assessment Checklist
*
Appendix 2.B Design for Social Justice Charrette
Acknowledgments
References
3 Social Justice in the Engineering Sciences
3.1 Why are the Engineering Sciences the Sacred Cow of the Engineering Curriculum?
3.2 Why Social Justice is Inherent in Engineering Sciences Course Content
3.3 Making Social Justice Visible without Compromising Technical Excellence
3.4 Examples of Making SJ Visible in the Engineering Sciences
3.5 Challenges of Integrating Social Justice into the Engineering Sciences
3.6 Opportunities Associated with Integrating Social Justice
3.7 Author Narratives on Challenges and Opportunities
3.8 Conclusion
Appendix 3.A Ifcs Case Study Matrix. The Case Study Options are Mapped to Technical and Social Justice Learning Objectives
Appendix 3.B SJ Integration Issues. For Future IFCS Course Iterations, the Key SJ Integration Issues and Their Potential Solutions are Explored
Acknowledgments
References
4 Humanities and Social Sciences in Engineering Education: From Irrelevance to Social Justice
4.1 Humanities and Social Sciences, The Engineering Curriculum, and the Distancing of Engineering Education from Pressing Social Problems
4.2 The Cold War, The Anti-Technology Movement, and a Marginalized HSS
4.3 It Is Time: Integration of Engineering and Social Justice Through the HSS—The Historical Convergence of ABET 2000 and More
4.4 Emerging Curricular Innovations
4.5 Engineering and Social Justice at Colorado School of Mines
4.6 Intercultural Communication at Colorado School of Mines
4.7 Document Design and Graphics at Utah State
4.8 Benefits and Limitations
Appendix 4.A Privilege Walk Questions
Appendix 4.B Privilege by Numbers Activity
Appendix 4.C Intercultural Communication Foundational Questions
Acknowledgments
References
5 Transforming Engineering Education and Practice
5.1 Practical Guidelines: From Problem Space to Program Space
5.2 Broader Implications of E4SJ-Infused Transformations
5.3 Identity Challenges and Inspirations
Appendix 5.A Assignment and Examples of Problem Rewrites
References
Notes
6 Conclusion: Making Social Justice Visible and Valued
6.1 Engineering Justice into Your Career
6.2 Future E4SJ Research Directions
References
Index
EULA
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1
Chapter 4
Table 4.1
Table 4.2
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
Figure 1.2
Figure 1.3
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Figure 2.2
Figure 2.3
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
Figure 3.2
Figure 3.3
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Figure 4.2
Figure 4.3
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
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A Note From the Series Editor
I heard Jon A. Leydens speak upon the occasion of winning the James M. Lufkin Award in 2012, sponsored by the IEEE Professional Communication Society (PCS). He won the award for his paper “What does professional communication research have to do with social justice? Intersections and sources of resistance,” and his talk was fantastic. My editor radar was pinging loudly: we need to publish his work in our Professional Engineering Communication series. I tracked him down in the hallway after the talk, looked him in the eye, and said, “Whatever you are publishing next, I want it.”
Several years later, our series now has its newest addition, Engineering Justice: Transforming Engineering Education and Practice by Jon A. Leydens and Juan C. Lucena. It is a work that should have deep impacts on engineering education, engineering communication, and engineering ethics professionals alike. As a university educator myself, I do my best to integrate concepts of ethics, social justice, and related topics into my engineering communication course. However, those efforts often seem (and, frankly, are) isolated and siloed from the rest of the engineering curriculum. Those working to transform engineering education, like Jon A. Leydens and Juan C. Lucena (along with their growing group of like-minded educational pioneers), have a vision for re-evaluating the core of the engineering enterprise. Of course, at the center of any such movement is the need for strong communication practices at all levels, and that is why this book is part of this series.
In truth, I feel reticent to say more about the book because it would just be redundant. The observations, assertions, and challenges posed by the authors are important and should be considered by every engineering department at every level. Not just considered… implemented, in my opinion. The authors have pulled in other supporting voices in the book that are more important than mine in this context, including an amazing call to action by Dr. Donna Riley in the Foreword.
While theory has its place (in this book and this series), we always look to be a source where recommendations for action and activity can be found. All of the books in the fast-growing PEC series keep a steady eye on the applicable while acknowledging the contributions that analysis, research, and theory can provide to these efforts. There is a strong commitment from the Professional Communication Society of IEEE and Wiley to produce a set of information and resources that can be carried directly into engineering firms, technology organizations, and academia alike.
For the series, we work with this philosophy: at the core of engineering, science, and technical work is problem solving and discovery. These tasks require, at all levels, talented and agile communication practices. We need to effectively gather, vet, analyze, synthesize, control, and produce communication pieces in order for any meaningful work to get done. This book, as others in the series before it, contributes deeply to that vision.
TRACI NATHANS-KELLY, PH.D.
About The Authors
Jon A. Leydens is Associate Professor in the Division of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines, where he has been since 1997. Research and teaching interests include engineering education, communication, and social justice. Dr. Leydens is co-author of Engineering and Sustainable Community Development (Morgan & Claypool, 2010), editor of Sociotechnical Communication in Engineering (Routledge, 2014), and author or co-author of many book chapters, journal articles, and conference papers.
A recipient of research and teaching awards and honors, Dr. Leydens, in 2015, won the Ronald S. Blicq Award for Distinction in Technical Communication Education from the Professional Communication Society of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). In 2015–2016, he was given the Exemplar in Engineering Ethics Education Award from the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE), along with CSM colleagues Juan C. Lucena and Kathryn Johnson. In 2016, their initiative “Enacting Macroethics: Making Social Justice Visible in Engineering Education” was showcased on the NAE's Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science.
Juan C. Lucena is Professor and Director of Humanitarian Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Juan obtained a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Virginia Tech and an M.S. in STS and B.S. in Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His books include Defending the Nation: U.S. Policymaking to Create Scientists and Engineers from Sputnik to the “War Against Terrorism” (University Press of America, 2005), Engineering and Sustainable Community Development (Morgan & Claypool, 2010), and Engineering Education for Social Justice: Critical Explorations and Opportunities (Springer, 2013).
Raised in a privileged family of engineers, lawyers, and doctors, Juan learned about the social injustices associated with the application of professional expertise, including engineering. Living in Bogota, Colombia, a city of eight million, he saw how the engineers working for the public utilities managed by his father built infrastructure that benefited the wealthy. Growing up, he learned to share water and electricity with poor families living nearby. As an engineering student in the 1980s, he experienced the engineering curriculum firsthand and how its content was shaped by politics at the end of the Cold War. Later as a Ph.D. student working under the mentorship of cultural anthropologist Gary Downey, he learned that engineers and engineering have culture that can be studied and, if necessary, transformed for the wellbeing of communities, social justice, and sustainability. Transforming engineering and engineering education to promote these goals is what he has been trying to do since becoming a professor in 1996.
Foreword
What does engineering have to do with justice? This is a persistent question, among engineers and non-engineers alike, because we have not yet spent enough time making the connections between these two seemingly disparate spheres of action in society.
In fact, we have assumed, erroneously, that engineering has nothing to do with justice. We have assumed engineering is somehow a neutral actor on the world stage or in local communities, and yet we do not have to look very far to see how engineering decisions both impact and are impacted by justice considerations. For example, in the recent cases of Volkswagen and Fiat Chrysler, software was designed with the explicit purpose of circumventing automobile emissions regulations, with consequences for ambient air quality and human health. We learn that decisions about sourcing and treatment methods in municipal water systems in Flint, MI, and Washington, DC, saved money but increased the lead content of drinking water for residents, disproportionately impacting low income and African American families.
We continue to accept too readily shallow explanations of the relationships between technology and society. We accept the assumption, without thinking, that the engineer just designs the technology, but bears no responsibility for how it is used. Or we accept too readily simplistic statements that give technology a singular and linear role in driving history: the printing press, or the automobile, or the Internet, we say, changed everything. We pay no regard to the historical conditions that gave rise to these technological developments, or specific choices in design and deployment that are not strictly technologically determined but tell rich stories of interplay in complex sociotechnical systems.
We accept too readily the facile self-aggrandizing pronouncements of members of the profession that engineers help society. To truly answer the question of what engineering has to do with justice, we must also be willing to examine closely and carefully what engineering has to do with injustice.
Once we are able to confront the possibilities for engineering to take place within, and contribute to, systems of injustice, we can begin to identify how engineering might be able to contribute to, or even bring about, more just realities for people and the planet.
As the authors of this book put it:
Given the power of engineering, we need an engineering education that is tailored to the great responsibility engineers will assume in transforming life in the rest of the 21st century and beyond. Engineers design, build and operate complex and imposing systems, capable of influencing the lives of millions of people, as well as the allocation of resources (e.g., water, energy), opportunities (e.g., access to work and commerce), risks and harms (e.g., flooding, nuclear disasters, groundwater contamination), and how different social groups receive these differently.
They argue not only that engineers can work for justice, but also that we have a moral responsibility to do so. Of any engineering activity, it is not only possible but also morally imperative to ask the central questions of social justice, who benefits and who suffers:
Who and what is engineering for? From how engineering is taught and practiced, who benefits? Who does not benefit from engineering advances? Who suffers or is constrained by what is created?
As an undergraduate student in the early 1990s, I chose to study engineering out of a deep concern for the environment. Yet I struggled to connect my campus activism on environmental issues with what I learned in class. As the environmental justice movement raised concerns about the inequitable distribution of environmental harms by race and by class, I saw no recognition, let alone a thoughtful response, from the engineering community. This book gives me hope that today's engineering students will have a different experience, where relevant justice concerns are taken up as part and parcel of what engineers do.
Can justice be engineered? As global neoliberal economic and political orders have waxed and then waned over the last several decades, a social justice resistance has emerged to challenge the status quo with increasingly intersectional strategies of solidarity, learning to organize across race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, ability, and many other difference categories. However, engineers remain largely invisible as activists. As American scientists organize a march on the Trump White House and the Administration's utter disregard for science and nature itself, it remains to be seen how many engineers will participate and what perspectives we will bring.
The central problem lies in engineers’ tendency to compartmentalize, to separate not only the technical and social in a false dichotomy, but also the professional and the personal, what it means to act as an engineer versus as a citizen. Yet, engineers are whole people, at once moral beings, citizens (of communities, nations, and planets), with obligations to act out of multiple duties in multiple roles. While the primary focus of the book is to scope criteria for engineering actions for social justice in a professional context, it is helpful to keep in mind that engineers also act in the world as whole people, as citizens, and as activists. This line is not cleanly drawn; what compels an engineer to support or oppose a pipeline, for example, is as much technical as it is social, and as much professional as it is personal.
Justice can be engineered, but it can also be sung, danced, written, painted, sculpted, historicized, politicked, philosophized, calculated, experimented, and simply felt. Those of us who work for justice must bring our whole selves to the work, with multiple approaches both instinctual and cerebral, and knowledge drawn from every frame of humanity's collective experience. As an activist and as an engineer, I have challenged pipelines and nuclear power plants, and defended access to reproductive health technologies. It mattered that there was an engineer's body on the line at the women's health clinic, an engineer's wrists handcuffed in arrest for civil disobedience, and an engineer's legs tired from marching. It also mattered that I was undertaking these actions alongside food service workers, lawyers, teachers, clergy people, accountants, garbage haulers, builders, parents, students, artists, and clerical workers, all putting their bodies on the line for the same cause.
How can engineers prepare for a world that demands their engagement with justice? A central argument of this book is that engineering education is presently mismatched with what is needed in engineering practice, and does not prepare engineers to meet the responsibilities of the profession. Today's typical engineering students graduate ill-equipped to properly frame and define engineering problems and solution spaces, to adequately identify the benefits and constraints of engineering, to holistically conceive of sustainability in their work, and to commit fully to dismantle power and privilege in an effort to foster diversity and inclusion.
We learn why it is that US engineering curricula seem to be stuck in remnants of the Cold War Era, revering engineering science as a “sacred cow” and resisting sociotechnical understandings of engineers’ work. We learn why current attempts to teach ethics or social dimensions of engineering as one-off courses or modular add-ons are ultimately insufficient for bringing social justice considerations from margin to center in engineering.
how might the engineering curriculum itself, rather than just the extracurricular accouterments, play a role in attracting and keeping highly talented students in engineering? Our approach goes where few have gone before: into the heart and soul of the engineering curriculum, the place where much of a young engineer's identity is forged and formed.
In a chapter-by-chapter examination of aspects of engineering curricula (design, engineering sciences), the authors show us how “Not only can good engineering and social justice exist simultaneously, but it can be argued that the very definition of good engineering is taking into account social justice.” In the engineering design space, we see the most sophisticated case studies of how social justice can be explicitly framed (or rendered invisible) throughout the process from problem formulation to implementation. In the discussion of engineering sciences, we gain a historical understanding of why it has been so difficult to integrate social justice considerations into these core “technical” courses, and we see how, in fact, social justice considerations are already endemic in these courses, and how these aspects can be brought to the fore. In the chapter on humanities and social sciences, we again gain historical knowledge of how social aspects of engineering came to be seen as outside the purview of the discipline, and why our present moment is a time ripe for reintegration of these concerns.
What ties together the curricular considerations and the practice of engineering for social justice is a set of considerations around problem definition and human dimensions of engineering activities. By critically interrogating problem definition, the authors operationalize social justice questions within the core of the engineering curriculum:
what is placed into the problem, what and who is left out, who draws the borders of what stays in and is left out and based on what assumptions and values, and whose perspectives (interests, values, knowledges, desires) are emphasized, de-emphasized, or ignored? Yet most of those issues remain invisible in the vast bulk of content-intensive, decontextualized US engineering curricula.
The book also makes an important contribution in driving the conversation around engineering and social justice into a practical application space. By developing and presenting a set of clear criteria for engineering for social justice (E4SJ), the authors answer persistent questions from students seeking further clarity in determining the extent to which a situation or proposed intervention is socially just. These criteria are most valuable in their delineation of questions to reflect on and aspects to explore in the social justice space. The great danger, very real in any engineering application setting, is that a series of open-ended explorations can too quickly become a reductionist checklist through which an engineer determines their project to be socially just. This is a plea to readers of this book to apply these criteria with the epistemic humility—recognition that our way of knowing is not the only way of knowing—and relationality with which they are presented and intended.
Given this, it is particularly apt that the first three considerations the authors present as criteria for engineering for social justice are listening contextually to develop trust and empathy; identifying structural conditions (economic, social, and cultural influences that shape people's opportunities, aspirations, and access to critical needs); and acknowledging political agency and mobilizing power. Taken together, a listening process that begins in epistemic humility and accounts for individual voices and histories reveals how both structural conditions and relations of power shape the very definitions and boundaries of engineering work. From it emerge a series of critical questions that prevent a unilateral imposition of the engineer's ideas of social justice upon a community:
Who decides what constitutes social justice? Whose input shapes what is considered a structural condition, what forms of power need to be mobilized, what are important opportunities and resources, what risks and harms need to be avoided, what human capabilities need to be enhanced? If the answer to those questions is the privileged and powerful alone, social justice has not been achieved.
These first three criteria provide a context for the more practical application of the final three criteria that guide design selection and evaluation: increasing opportunities and resources; reducing imposed risks and harms; and enhancing human capabilities. Socially just engineering activities ought to effect these three outcomes, as measured from the perspectives of those most affected. These outcomes stand in stark contrast to the more common engineering goals of efficiency or profit. In addition to providing alternative ends to engineering work, they illustrate how engineering is already deeply sociotechnical.
This approach to engineering for justice illustrates not only the role engineers can play in addressing social inequity, but also how engineering educators can increase the appeal, relevance, and interest of engineering curricula to prospective students from many different backgrounds by lending new visibility to salient sociotechnical problems of our time. It enables us “to position engineering to create a more just world, and engineers as agents of change.” By redefining the profession's scope of work, by uncovering the already sociotechnical nature of engineering problems, and by redirecting the ends of the profession toward expanding human capabilities, this book answers the questions of how engineering and social justice are interrelated, how we must change engineering education to prepare students for a world that demands our engagement with justice, how engineering can direct its considerable skillsets and resources toward achieving socially just ends, and how engineering must adapt to attain crucial contextual listening skills and an awareness of structural conditions and power relations to become true allies to social justice movements.
As an engineering educator, I am grateful for this book, eager to use it in my own classrooms, and hopeful for the transformations it will facilitate for all of us engaged the work of engineering and social justice.
DR. DONNA M. RILEY
Professor and Kamyar Haghighi Head of the
School of Engineering Education
College of Engineering
Purdue University
Preface
Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are just produced.
—Alfred North Whitehead, English mathematician and philosopher
* * *
In our mind's eye, we can envision what happens when light passes through a prism. When engineering educators see course design through the prism of Engineering-for-Social-Justice (E4SJ) criteria, a spectrum of previously invisible colors appears. New possibilities and capabilities emerge.
This book is about what becomes visible when we bring E4SJ into our projects, homework, and courses. Several dimensions begin to emerge for us and for our students. First, the power dimensions of engineering are revealed as students learn to ask who benefits and who does not, given solutions to particular problems. For example, as they ask probing questions guided by the E4SJ criteria, the historical neglect of engineering for the problems of the poor and disempowered become apparent, as does how the heteronormativity and middle-class normativity in engineering render some groups invisible. But more importantly, students also come to realize that engineers and engineering can be positive agents and a liberating force for social justice.
More than just introducing a lively in-class discussion, E4SJ criteria can transform the engineering classroom as a site for critical reflection about identity (as students begin to wonder who they want to be as engineers), the relevance and uses of engineering (as students begin to ask what and who engineering is for), expertise (as students begin to ask who are the real experts about poverty and other engineering-related inequality issues), and the future of the profession. Furthermore, the E4SJ criteria have brought to life students’ passion about making engineering relevant for underserved groups and addressing social injustices. Engineering, the students realize, is never neutral because it does not exist in a social vacuum. Through this realization, there is a wonderful process of “coming out” by students who feel personally and politically engaged with engineering, perhaps for the first time in their college education. E4SJ facilitates the disruption of the boundary between the personal and professional in ways that strengthen both.
As we have taken E4SJ on the road to conferences and workshops to invite others new to E4SJ to incorporate the criteria in their courses, we have encountered a few initial reactions that the engineering–social justice connection was a form of foolishness. Yet overall, and especially over time, the response has been remarkably positive. For example, consider the response when Rick Vaz, former Dean of Interdisciplinary and Global Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a leader of global projects in engineering for community development, first encountered the E4SJ criteria. He told us, “You two have given us [WPI project-based-learning team] the language to understand what we have been trying to do for many years.” Professor Kepa Morgan of the University of Auckland, Australia, realized that the E4SJ criteria illuminated some of the key reasons why his Maori student recruitment, retention, and performance initiative was so successful. Kathryn Johnson, our colleague at the Colorado School of Mines, was so inspired after an E4SJ workshop that she wrote a successful US National Science Foundation grant to integrate social justice in an undergraduate Feedback Control Systems course; she then mentored other instructors in similar acts of integration across other engineering courses. After our many E4SJ workshops (including at the American Society for Engineering Education annual conference), in which we invite participants to incorporate E4SJ in their courses, we see clear evidence for tapping into a need for E4SJ; many workshop participants approached us later asking for specific activities, examples, and papers on how to incorporate E4SJ in specific courses. The above responses and kind of demand from our esteemed peers motivated this book.
We invite readers to experiment with these E4SJ criteria, using few, some, or all of them in your classrooms. We do not expect a full embracement or deployment, and we actually recommend gradual integration. The E4SJ criteria can be applied flexibly in different institutional contexts, courses, activities, and for different audiences of engineering students. E4SJ criteria can act as a much-needed framework for evaluating the relevance of engineering work to social justice. As shown in this book, you can use them in courses in engineering design (Chapter 2), engineering science (Chapter 3), and in humanities and social science courses for engineering students (Chapter 4).
We are currently planning to extend the use of the E4SJ criteria to other corners of engineering education, such as the Grand Challenges Scholars Program, makerspaces being built in our campus, and project-based learning (PBL) initiatives elsewhere. We hope you will join us in exploring new spaces in which these criteria can be applied with the hope of aligning engineering education closer to social justice. Although these two may seem like odd companions, looking through the E4SJ prism reveals that social justice dimensions have always been inherent in engineering decision making, from problem definition through problem solution processes. Once that realization takes hold, the transformation of engineering practice becomes a more viable possibility.
As you will see in the examples presented in this book, the E4SJ criteria can be an effective pedagogical tool, a heuristic strategy to challenge decontextualized engineering education problems, and a mechanism to develop one of the most important—yet most neglected in the curriculum—engineering skills: understanding and applying how sociotechnical interplays not only matter but also represent the way the world actually works. Although part of a larger philosophical debate, we contend that in twenty-first century human endeavors, there are no longer purely “social” or purely “technical” domains. All aspects of human life need to be understood as sociotechnical—especially engineering—as today few human endeavors are possible without technology and no lasting technological development is possible without humans. And while there are frameworks to understand the interplay between these two dimensions, such as from Science and Technology Studies, enacting such frameworks takes time and additional curricular space that often faculty and students are not willing to take, particularly in an already full engineering curriculum.
The E4SJ criteria provide a relatively efficient yet effective way to introduce students to the notion that engineering is sociotechnical, and in our experience, E4SJ leaves students wanting to know more. The criteria are also a vehicle for faculty to introduce something that they may care and feel very passionate about but have little time or background to develop.
Readers will be disappointed if they expect this book to be a definitive empirical work on the viability of rendering social justice visible in the engineering curriculum. The focus of this book is not on assessment or evaluation data; we leave that for our journal papers. Rather, this book is designed, first, to invite people to experiment with E4SJ in their classes, second, to add to the foundation of engineering education research by providing research-based tools for such experimentation, and, third, to inspire future empirical research. If this book is successful, it will ignite in readers curiosity and experimentation that lead to new E4SJ-related educational research that bolsters the empirical case for E4SJ.
This book is also a drop in a larger bucket of past and present efforts to integrate engineering and social justice. For us, these efforts began with our first encounter of the conflicts and possibilities between engineering and social justice, at a 2008 US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) conference, where we met thoughtful advocates of social justice in engineering, such as Donna Riley, Caroline Baillie, and Dean Nieusma. The NAE conference catalyzed our subsequent US National Science Foundation grant, which led to the creation of a course in “Engineering and Social Justice” and to our more involved participation in the Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace network, through which we co-organized two conferences—in Bogota, Colombia and Buenos Aires, Argentina. More recently, our work has led to championing interest among our engineering faculty peers, who manifested great interest but at first had no clear framework for integrating E4SJ into the curriculum. Thus, this book builds on and extends an established tradition connecting engineering AND social justice. To that tradition, we offer the E4SJ criteria. We hope you will join this wave of educators committed to make engineering as it should be: responsive to the needs and problems of the underserved.
By making E4SJ visible, we hope that this book will be an inspiration and an effective tool to increase pedagogical innovation, relevance, and, perhaps more importantly, student involvement and passion across the entire engineering curriculum—and by extension, across their entire engineering careers. Furthermore, we hope that readers join us in building connections and collaborations with those faculty in emerging spaces in and around the engineering curriculum, such as makerspaces, design studios, community engagement initiatives. And in the future, we hope to see Centers for Engineering and Social Justice in the same ways that today we are seeing centers such as the Center for Project Based Learning (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Center for Engineering and Health (Northwestern University), and Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education (Pennsylvania State University).
JON A. LEYDENS
JUAN C. LUCENA
Acknowledgments
We are indebted to many wonderful, generous, insightful colleagues. Particular thanks go to Dean Nieusma at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who knows more about the practical and theoretical connections between engineering design and social justice than anyone we have ever encountered. His guidance was crucial in shaping Chapter 2 on engineering design, which was informed by an earlier paper we wrote with Dean on design for social justice [1].
We are grateful to the International Journal of Service Learning in Engineering for the right to excerpt portions of an article inspired by our collaboration with Dean [2]. Thanks also go to the American Society for Engineering Education for allowing us to excerpt from conferences papers, informing Chapters 2 [1], 3 [3], [4], and 4 [5], which have now been substantively revised from earlier work.
We would also like to acknowledge our debt to those whose work has inspired our own. There are those who have shown us the way by laying important practical and theoretical foundations, particularly Donna Riley, Caroline Baillie, Erin Cech, Gary Downey, Joe Herkert, Dean Nieusma, Martha Nussbaum, Alice Pawley, Paul Polak, and Langdon Winner. There are those who have inspired us with their programs, projects, courses, and papers, such as Elizabeth Cox (opening pathways for low-income/first-generation students into engineering), Marybeth Lima (designing playgrounds in post-Katrina Louisiana), Jessica Smith (bringing social justice into the heart of corporate social responsibility), and Rick Vaz (integrating social justice in project-based learning). One font of continual inspiration is the hundreds of engineering students who have incorporated social justice into their designs (such as the CSM FourCross bike project team discussed in Chapter 2), despite curricular and ideological constraints, or students who have been open to exploring the value social justice can bring to engineering case studies, community engagement projects, and more.
We owe particular gratitude to those who have had the courage to experiment with social justice in the diverse aspects of the engineering design realm, including Caroline Baillie and Marybeth Lima (described in Chapter 2), and of the engineering science classroom, especially Kathryn Johnson, James Huff, and Donna Riley (described in Chapter 3). Special thanks go to Rebecca Walton for her contributions to Chapter 4 on humanities and social science courses that engage social justice criteria.
The authors would like to thank the National Science Foundation for supporting our social justice initiatives through grants SES-0930213 (2009–2012) and EEC-1441806 (2014–2017). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
We are particularly indebted to thoughtful chapter reviews from peers, including the following:
Atsushi Akera, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Kristin Boudreau, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Erin Cech, University of Michigan
Jered Dean, Colorado School of Mines
Brent Jesiek, Purdue University
Kathryn Johnson, Colorado School of Mines
Susan M. Lord, University of San Diego
Christopher Papadopoulos, University of Puerto Rico–Mayaguez
Raghu Pucha, Georgia Tech
The patience-of-a-saint award goes to our Series Editor at Wiley-IEEE Press, Traci Nathans-Kelly. Despite our delays, she encouraged us at every step and gave multiple helpful recommendations. Thank you, Traci.
As we wrote this book, we pasted nearby a hard copy of the names of dozens of engineers who have encouraged or inspired us over the years. We have been the fortunate benefactors of much encouragement and support, and since their names are too numerous to mention, we apologize—but you know who you are. Thank you.
Any remaining errors or issues in this book remain fully and completely our responsibility.
References
J. A. Leydens, J. C. Lucena, and D. Nieusma, “What is design for social justice?,” in
ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition
, Indianapolis, IN, USA, 2014.
J. A. Leydens and J. C. Lucena, “Social justice: A missing, unelaborated dimension in humanitarian engineering and learning through service,”
Int. J. Serv. Learn. Eng. Humanit. Eng. Soc. Entrep.
, vol.
9
, no. 2, pp. 1–28, 2014.
J. C. Lucena and J. A. Leydens, “From sacred cow to dairy cow: Challenges and opportunities in integrating of social justice in engineering science courses,” in
American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference Proceedings 2015
, Seattle, WA, 2015.
K. Johnson, J. Leydens, B. Moskal, D. Silva, and J. S. Fantasky, “Social justice in control systems engineering,” in
ASEE Annual Conference and Exhibition
, Seattle, 2015.
J. A. Leydens and J. C. Lucena, “Making the invisible visible: Integrating engineering-for-social-justice criteria in humanities and social science courses,” in
Proceedings for the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference
, New Orleans, LA, 2016, pp. 1–11.
Introduction
It is important that a focus on “preparation” of future engineers not be tied to an agenda that solely emphasizes what professional engineering “needs” and economic competitiveness. It also is possible to organize an engineering educational system to prepare recent graduates to be change agents and participants in new social movements within engineering work practice.
—Dr. Reed Stevens, Dr. Aditya Johri, and Dr. Kevin O'Connor, 2014 [1, p. 119]
* * *
With great power, comes great responsibility. As we have noted elsewhere [2], engineering has the power to transform the world: the water we drink, air we breathe, infrastructure we use for transport, energy we produce, methods we use to conduct warfare and peace, and much more. Given the power of engineering, we need an engineering education that is tailored to the great responsibility engineers will assume in transforming life in the rest of the twenty-first century and beyond. Engineers design, build, and operate complex and imposing systems, capable of influencing the lives of millions of people, as well as the allocation of resources (e.g., water, energy), opportunities (e.g., access to work and commerce), risks and harms (e.g., flooding, nuclear disasters, groundwater contamination), and how different social groups receive these differently.
Consider the devastation that took place in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2005. The engineered infrastructure (levees) failed during a natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina. The result involved vastly differing consequences for various groups of people, even though they were in the range of just a few miles. After the hurricane and rupture of levees in the southern US city, the death toll exceeded 1800 people and damage costs surpassed $100 billion, in what is considered “the costliest hurricane ever” in US history [3].
Engineers design, build, and operate complex and imposing systems, capable of influencing the lives of millions of people, as well as the allocation of resources (e.g., water, energy), opportunities (e.g., access to work and commerce), risks and harms (e.g., flooding, nuclear disasters, groundwater contamination), and how different social groups receive these differently.
In the case of Katrina, the failure of the levees in New Orleans affected residents who were poor, mostly black, and some with disabilities more than any other social groups, taking away their resources (especially property), opportunities (to access their homes, banks, roads, medical care, and to rest and replenish at home so they can be functional members of society) while exposing them to more risks and harms (disease, drowning, homelessness, and more) [4]. Among others, questions that often remain neglected in cases like the design of the levee system include:
Who will be at the most and least risk when the system fails?
How many deaths are acceptable when the system fails?
What costs will those in charge incur if they improve the system? What happens if they do nothing?
When a system fails (because it will eventually if not improved), how will people at risk be evacuated?
Overall, how does the system distribute opportunities and resources while minimizing disproportionate risks and harms? From the system, who benefits and who suffers?
Although the authors and researchers of this book work in a US engineering educational context (yet occasionally teach and advise abroad), and thus provide examples like the one above primarily from US contexts, our intention is by no means to be exclusive of other engineering educational systems. We simply know our own context best and can speak from that situated space. However, many of the ideas in this book are adaptable to multiple engineering contexts, particularly when those adaptations are attuned to national, cultural, and other institution-shaping realities. Also, even readers working in US contexts will want to adapt their curricular and extra-curricular innovations to the challenges and opportunities inherent in their state, local, and institutional contexts.
Most everyday tools in the twenty-first century are engineered, and those engineering interventions make possible communication, health, transportation, and much more. That we live in a highly engineered world may be taken for granted by those with the financial means to use smart phones, ride commuter rail lines, fly in jets, obtain positron emission tomography (PET) scans, and more. Engineering designs and systems substantially influence human health and well-being. However, in part due to the largely technical nature of engineering education, that much of the global population lacking access to such designs and systems and are disproportionately exposed to the adverse impacts of engineering decisions can be invisible or vague to engineers-to-be. According to the World Bank, in 2012, 2.1 billion people—35% of the human population—lived on less than US $3.10 a day, a common poverty threshold. Engineers have played some role in reducing that percentage (via infrastructure that provides access to clean water, better sanitation, etc.), as in 1990, 66% of the population lived on less than that amount [5], and engineers stand to play even more vital roles in the future.
Drawing from [2], this chapter articulates the approach of this book by describing pressing issues for engineering education and the engineering profession. Those issues serve as partial motivation for our research, and we identify our research methods and theoretical frameworks, provide a clear definition of Engineering for Social Justice (E4SJ) and six associated E4SJ criteria, and explain guidelines on the implementation of E4SJ criteria. Finally, we preview forthcoming chapters and summarize the benefits of the E4SJ approach.
1 Pressing Issues for Engineering Education and the Engineering Profession
The approach proposed in this book addresses a host of issues that are pressing for engineering educators and engineering practitioners. Among others, those issues include a mismatched curriculum, the responsibility that comes from the power of engineering, the framing of the benefits and constraints of engineering, the need for robust definitions of sustainability, the opportunity to foster inclusive excellence, and the chance to cultivate recently emerging interests in engineering education.
1.1 A Mismatched Curriculum
Most US engineering curricula in the first quarter of the twenty-first century still hold multiple remnants of the engineering curriculum that emerged out of the Cold War, particularly influenced by the technological race with the former USSR [6]. In part to gain legitimacy among scientists and within science, that Sputnik-catalyzed curriculum placed primary emphasis on the engineering sciences and core math-based scientific foundational courses, with considerably less emphasis than previous engineering curricula on hands-on engineering design or humanities and social science (HSS) courses [6].
Today, we need to understand whether a curriculum forged in different historical circumstances not only effectively prepares students for the realities of present and future engineering practice but for engineering work for social justice. Since we explore this theme throughout the book, we will only sketch the rough contours of it here. First, it is important to note that studies of engineering practice consistently underscore the practicing engineer's need to think sociotechnically [1], [7]–[9]. For instance, consistent themes emerge from a study that involved over 300 interviews with practicing engineers, survey data from nearly 400 engineers, and multiple years of participant observations of Australasian engineers:
Many [of the interviewed engineers] felt frustrated because they did not think that their jobs provided them with enough technical challenges. Others felt frustrated because they thought that a different career choice might have led to a job that would enable them to make more use of the advanced technical subjects they had studied in their university courses. Many of them were actually planning to leave their career in engineering. In our research, we found that more experienced engineers, those who had stuck with it for a decade or more, had mostly realized that the real intellectual challenges in engineering involve people and technical issues simultaneously. Most had found working with these challenges far more satisfying than remaining entirely in the technical domain of objects. [10, emphases added]
Although we do not have enough studies on engineering practice [1], it is likely we never will; engineering is a highly heterogeneous, dynamic, complex mesh of multiple sub-disciplines (mechanical, electrical, etc.) and cannot be simplistically characterized. However, extant professional engineering practice studies point in similar directions, and a mismatch emerges between how we prepare the next generation of engineers and what practicing engineers do. For instance, a 2005 National Academy of Engineering (NAE) book underscored a “disconnect between engineers in practice and engineers in academe” [11, pp. 20–21]. In a summary of studies working to understand the intersections of undergraduate engineering education and engineering practice, some researchers have noted, “the types of problems that are solved and the processes of problem solving in these different contexts differ in both substance and structure… Engineering problems found in school…are [generally] organized to develop facility in solving ‘well-structured problems’ [as opposed to ill-structured ones found in the workplace]” [1, p. 124].
When we educate engineers, we frequently emphasize predefined, decontextualized, closed-ended technical problem solving in the bulk of the curriculum—the engineering sciences. Yet practicing engineers work to define and solve complex contextualized, open-ended, sociotechnical problems. Studies have reinforced that practicing engineers do not think a traditional engineering education prepares them effectively for engineering practice [10], [12]. Despite the importance of (still too few) studies on engineering practice, we agree with those contending.
It is important that a focus on “preparation” of future engineers not be tied to an agenda that solely emphasizes what professional engineering “needs” and economic competitiveness. It also is possible to organize an engineering educational system to prepare recent graduates to be change agents and participants in new social movements within engineering work practice. However, in either case, concrete images of engineering work are critical resources for rethinking engineering education and making empirically based assessments of progress. [1, pp. 119–120]
Educators committed to improving engineering education could propose diverse approaches to the above mismatch between engineering education and engineering practice. Some can advocate for doing nothing and allowing engineers to learn on the job, an approach that reifies the status quo. Others emphasize ethics and/or broader social implications of engineering work, perhaps via courses in ethics or Science, Technology, and Society (STS) for engineers. While a valid start, the latter approach is insufficient. If we relegate the discussion of social dimensions of engineering work to STS or to HSS courses, they will occupy a marginalized position in engineering education and sociotechnical thinking will not be seen as integral to “real” engineering [13]. Furthermore, discussions of ethics and broader social implications often lack the critical analyses that occur when using the E4SJ criteria described below, particularly the emphasis on two key tools: identifying underlying social structural, root causes that keep inequity in place (see Section 5.2 below), and enhancing human capabilities (see 5.6 below).
Research on engineering practice shows rich interplays between the social and the technical dimensions of problem defining and solving [1], [10], [14]. Such sociotechnical integration raises important questions about engineering education: where in the curriculum do we see sociotechnical interplays and opportunities for students to understand, use, and reflect on sociotechnical thinking? The word sociotechnical accentuates what science and technology studies scholars have been saying for over three decades: that “technical” problems do not exist in a vacuum, somewhere beyond the social, political, and other factors that shape and are shaped by technical decision making [7], [15]. Sociotechnical thinking involves non-bifurcated reasoning in which the social and technical dimensions are not seen as occupying separate realms; instead, engineers who think sociotechnically remain open to how social and technical dimensions shape problem conceptualization throughout the process—from initial problem definition to eventual solution. “Social” dimensions can be thought of as existing on a continuum ranging from the relatively superficial in the grand scheme (issues like timeliness and budget), to more salient dimensions (effective communication with stakeholders and client satisfaction), to the most salient—listening to and factoring into the problem definition and solution (PDS) phrases human perspectives, particularly of people and groups who will be most affected by the project, especially in terms of any given community's capacities (described in Section 5.6 below).
Looking at a flowchart of the mechanical engineering curriculum (Figure 1) at our institution, the Colorado School of Mines, for example (and other engineering curricula could make a similar point), where do we see the social and the technical interface? The majority of the curriculum is in the center of the flowchart, including introductory courses in fundamental sciences (such as chemistry and physics), and courses in engineering sciences; explicit sociotechnical interplays are rare in this portion of the curriculum, particularly the engineering sciences, which are dominated by technical content-intensive, decontextualized, closed-ended problem solving. What about HSS courses, which at our university and many others have historically occupied 13–20% of engineering curricula [16]? With a few exceptions—such as courses in STS, anthropology, and communication—those courses do the exact opposite of the technical core and engineering science courses: they emphasize the social divorced from the technical. Yet typically such courses do not accentuate sociotechnical interplays. Apart from physical education, free electives, and math/computation courses, that leaves only design courses, which constitute 11% of the curriculum in Figure 1, and generally less than 15% of any given engineering program in our institution.
Figure 1. Mechanical Engineering Degree Flowchart. The flowchart outlines common courses for a mechanical engineering undergraduate degree in the United States. Note that this is a generalization, based on the curriculum at Colorado School of Mines, not a direct map for any engineering degree.
Although design courses are an ideal venue for rendering visible sociotechnical intersections, unfortunately such courses are a small part of the overall curriculum, and research suggests that—in part due to the problem solving methods inculcated in the engineering sciences—students do not see them as “real” engineering [17]. Furthermore, design courses suffer from the “kitchen sink” effect: they are loaded with meeting multiple assessment benchmarks. For instance, the six-credit Senior Design course in Figure .1 at one point was responsible for 9 of the 11 Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) criterion 3 program outcomes.
The issue is not solely the quantity of assessment benchmarks, but that many of the difficult-to-assess, nontechnical, and/or professional outcomes are concentrated in design (particularly capstone) courses. That skewing generally exempts other—especially engineering science—courses in the curriculum from focusing on multiple salient assessment issues. If one goal of an engineering education is to promote understanding of the kinds of sociotechnical intersections common in engineering practice, it is clear this kind of curriculum is mismatched—and needs improvement. This book provides a way to begin to address that mismatch by making sociotechnical dimensions visible, as they are inherent in engineering systems, designs, and artifacts. More so, we argue that not addressing this mismatch prevents engineering education from seriously engaging already inherent social justice issues.
1.2 Responsibility that Emerges from the Transformative Power of Engineering
Although the status of any profession rises when such professionals act ethically, and ethical action is quite valued in most professions, engineers have unique potential and thus unique responsibilities to society. As noted above, because their impact on human lives is potentially so far-reaching, engineers-to-be merit a solid grounding in the responsibility that comes with the power of engineering.
What curricular implications does that power have for an undergraduate engineering education? This book raises that question and eschews traditional approaches that are confined to issues of individual responsibility that may surface in HSS courses tailored to the needs of engineers. As we explain throughout the book, to facilitate deeper understandings of engineers’ power and broader associated responsibilities, such discussions need to be integrated at multiple junctures throughout the engineering curriculum, especially in those places deemed “purely technical.”
In serious discussions of the entire engineering curriculum, two key concepts merit explanation: microethics and macroethics [18]. We refer to this as “Herkert's challenge”: Long time engineering ethics educator Joe Herkert has challenged engineering ethics to grow out of its twentieth century focus on microethics and expand into macroethics. As Herkert explains, “‘Microethics’ considers individuals and internal relations of the engineering profession; ‘macroethics’ applies to the collective social responsibility of the profession and to societal decisions about technology” [18, p. 373]. So while microethics centers on individuals’ intra-professional decisions, macroethics broadens the scope to examine how human decisions—about designs, systems, and models—(dis)proportionately affect diverse groups in society, as discussed above in the case of Hurricane Katrina. Whether we know it, all engineering instructors directly or indirectly teach engineering ethics: whether we are teaching statics, thermodynamics, or design, our students are attentive to which issues are accentuated, de-emphasized, and ignored, as well as how those issues are framed.
For example, if most statics problems presented in class, textbooks, homework, and exams are framed around urban infrastructure used by certain groups in society (e.g., beams in high rise buildings often occupied by financial organizations), we could be sending a message to our students that beams in other contexts, such as shanty houses occupied by poor and displaced migrants, are not worthy of engineering analysis. Similarly, if when teaching thermodynamics we emphasize the internal combustion engine above everything else, we signal that other forms of energy for transportation, such as electric motors, require less attention. How can macroethical issues gain a stronger, more meaningful and relevant role in engineering education? This book maps a strategy for rising to Herkert's challenge.
We are part of a profession with significant power and knowledge over others, especially vulnerable groups, and thus we should be accountable to and responsible toward them.
