Ketra Schmitt

Engineering students receive little time in their undergraduate education to engage with social and political concepts. Impacts of Technology on Society is a required course by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) in which engineering undergraduate students are exposed to a broad number of new ideas. This class is exciting to teach and enriching for the students. It is also an important opportunity to introduce them to a critical perspective on the market economy, environment, and structural inequality. Part of what makes this class work is discussion and exploration of ideas. Classroom management has always played a vital role in managing discussions so that they are productive rather than destructive. These are undergraduate students who are not practiced at expressing ideas or developing nuanced opinions, and they need help to explore complex trade-offs. In my first 7 years of teaching this course, hot button intrusions occurred rarely and were manageable. Following the 2016 election, what was once a joy to teach became a minefield. 

There are several competing reasons for this. The scope of the course is extremely broad and functions as a survey course for Science Technology Studies and Technology Policy. Over the last few years, most students are increasingly informed and receptive to discussions on the environment, race and inequality. Those who are most informed also tend to be overwhelmed and hopeless about the future. Significantly, a vocal minority deny climate change, gender equality and many basic human rights tenets. In my last semester, roughly half the students expressed the belief that male, white students will not receive jobs and are treated unequally in hiring and promotion.

In other words, the present was not a fun place to teach. At the same time, I have become increasingly concerned about the toxic impacts of hopelessness on students, particularly as it is their political will and creativity that will be called upon to make substantive changes in the world. I have also been thinking about the pervasiveness of dystopic world views in science fiction and fantasy, and the ways in which these worldviews limit imaginations of the future. Others have written about the potential roles that science fiction can play in futuring and in predicting technology policy scenarios. During class, we still grapple with present issues; using a variety of sources and types of evidence, we consider the world as it is in the present. Having the historic lens allows us to do so with less heat and less hopelessness.

To measure the impact of this future optimism treatment, we developed a survey instrument to measure students’ perceptions of the future as well as their beliefs on the role that policy, government and social movements play in technological change. Pre- and post-test surveys were administered in 4 sections of Impacts of Technology on Society along with 2 sections of Technical Writing and Communication, an additional required course by CEAB.  Two of these sections received a future optimism treatment over the course of a semester. The course was situated in the year 2371. The final project was to develop an explanation of how people from 2018 were able to solve their problems and start on the road to a utopia. We will present statistical analysis of the survey results and evaluate the potential for future optimism to enhance engineering education.