Thursday, August 5, 2010 ESJP Conference, London Typed by Lisa McLoughlin Panel session service learning: in the service of social justice

Dean Nieusma: Public participation in engineering design practice

We are all going together where my abstract points.

I am inviting you all to participate in the participatory action research project which was framed at this conference last year: the questions, approaches, and answers all evolve together and change together—the idea is to frame a bigger ambitios project and anyone who wants to participate can take ownership and contribute.

The abstract is a piece of the project I have taken ownership for and I am ask you to participate.’’

The 3 facets of organization: Research, taking care of the group, practice <<<<<(?)

4 areas from last year 1)skills inventory 2) past-current research of yours central to SJP work 3) questions you would like answered about ESJP work 4) main approaches to ESJP you employ—-how and where you do ESJP work- compiling these gets an interesting concept

In conversations yesterday a 5th item came up: in the spirit of the bibliography, a clearinghouse list of people who are doing work in this area already. For me this would be bounded by people who are explicitly attending to social power.

Feel free to email me about any of the above. I agree to coordinate the ongoing research project which will change from year to year. Neiusma at rpi.edu

My research (see the abstract) I am interested in expertise as a concept mostly because when we use expertise we have in our mind a muddled mix of specialized knowledge and institutional authority. Lots of people have specialized knowledge that we do not automatically assume as expert—people who are not recognized as experts legitimately are not entitled to speak. Decisions that impact your life should have your input, but often these people are not allowed to speak (e.g. a village in Shri

2. Craig Tutus and Carla Zoltowski Toward the socially just engineer: Ethics Pedagogy and the problems of service-learning engineering

My focus has been on how engineering students who participate in service learning act==problems, how to overcome, how to be better. I ask them: What are the ethical issues in your project work? What did you do to deal with them? What would have happened if you had not dealt with them.

Variety of answers===safety was paramount, some thought there were no issues. 300 students were surveyed. These answers are not enough. Some of them gave in depth answers while others were clueless. This is a problem.

What they do not get is the social impact of a project like this, e.g. a dam===flooding the area behind it required moving 13 cities and the people themselves had to move their buildings and got crappy houses in a new location. So this was a major social impact. Students did not get that beforehand. They did not realize people had to move. They had not thought of these problems.

The traditional decision-making design process was changed to include people in the middle—lists the stakeholders and their context and allows this to inform the way you design. Otherwise you do not get an ethical design.

Example: elementary school in rural Indiana. Engineers described the students incorrectly—didn’t realize poverty and mix of cultures there.

We needed authentic examples, human-centered design, social impact, social context, ethical decision making, and used the tools of lectures and discussion. Our results are positive.

3. Arias, Bejarano, Ramirez, Silva, Valderrama The engineering and the social in Engineers without boarders Pictures of people he is representing are behind him to make them present and he explains what is happening

He has been working with them for 5 years and wants to reflect on the work. The organization is small. Their aimes are to intervene, to educate, and to produce knowledge. We want to theorize from action. The strategy is to take seriously the name EWB THE QUESTIONINGS OF THE FRONTIERS 1. North-south (not to replicate that usually the north does things in the south not vice versa; the rich come in to intervene) 2. Intervention or education; intervention through education; education through intervention 3. Product vs. process—need to include the users 4. Rural vs urban Need to do this work, but do not replace the state´s responsibility, as in when the state should be providing water to urban communities, but maybe not the rural population, so need to be aware of that. 5. Institutional support or tolerance —-some in the school don not count this work toward career or think of it as real engineering. This is not helpful.

Thinking about the frontiers……. Is it really possible to apply established engineering knowledge for helping poverty or do we need to develop new knowledge is it engineering or something else (post-engineering, design, social engineering) At some point a university becomes involved in a corporate push to help others, so the university should have social engineering.

4. Lizzie Brown: engineers without boarders Australia founded in 2003, over 5000 people (engineers and non), chapters are the heart and soul of the organization. 1.3 million dollars a year Everyone without boarders (EWB)

We work with communities: a small # of long term partnerships with 2-way exchange of knowledge. Example: Cambodian school for prosthetics can now deliver training on its own===success when they do not need us anymore. Do lots of work with indigenous Austrailan communities.

We do a lot of work on the engineering profession to create change—deepen understanding of how to achieve social justice 1. facilitate meaningful and lasting change 2. 2 engage individuals and organsations in meaningful volunterism 3. improve development engineering practices 4. 3 nurture development leaders 5. 5 be a small giant

Creating a new engineering culture: community centered design cross cultural understanding critical thinking leaders of social change

Our volunteers become conscious, concerned, comprehend and challenged and finally champion. We focus on comprehend and challenge with students.

The EWB journey connects individuals with learning opportunities—all paths are different—I would be glad to talk to you about them.

1 key intiative is the design program challenge for first year students which involves over 8000 students per year on real curriculum-based projects which are focussed on engineering for community development. Good opportunity to think about community centered design and appropriate tech right from the start of their engineering career.

Example: Lexie a Melbourn volunteer engineer. She is involved a lot in the group and is in Vietnam and doing undergrad research there. We are proud and excited about her and she will be heading companies next.

Panel Discussion: Q: Lizzie—you are great, the UK program is smaller. In Australia is engineering course standardized? A. no, but most have a first year class with team-based design for 2-10 weeks long. We look for them as opportunities.’ Q how did you get into the university? B. A personal relationships—building them.

Q. speaking as someone who works with them, they need to expand. A the whole range— helping students prepare to think that way Q Dean talked about expertise. Have you looked at community dev projects—local experts and why do we have foreign experts A. yes we spend a lot of energy categorizing different sorts, for me it is interesting to see what counts as expertise, and even locally, you see the same kind of hierarchy locally, so the pattern of relationship is the same000when someone says let me help you and you do not have money or knowledge to offer, why are you there—we assume we have knowledge to offer how to balance with the local experts Q: this is related to our dialog and might get me kicked out. We talked about how difficult it was to engage industry folks b-c they are not willing to question capitalism. But we are willing to have Lizzie who is giving her sales pitch of EWB which has an underlying form of international development and power relations but yet we have an easier time to accept her here and why? Is it because she will critique what she does? A. Yes, that is exactly the difference. We are all asking what social justice means. We chose not to work with some of these groups b-c they imposed a missionary´s mission and we did not feel comfortable associating with them (EWB USA). So it is a frought conversation and a tension when development is an exploiting project and you need all sorts of expertise that are not engineering that are not always there. But this group is open to social justice. A. I am interested in self-critique in my related work and the reason to do it is to practice what I preach. I do not understand and it is difficult and we are trying and need encouragement and help. All the social science students are great at deconstructing but can not offer solutions, and engineers can build but not critique, so they need to work together and we have to critique ourselves. A: that answers Andres question—it has to be interdisciplinary work not just engineering. A. EWB agrees and we have STS people in the group—we are interdisciplinary and we work with the community A I was more raising a concern—there is a lesson for us all here, we are willing to entertain industry folks if they will self-critique A but they will not do it unless we talk about shareholder value. We were thinking of applying for a grant to work with aboriginals near a mining community. They had concern, the last line was asking for a description of what the mining company would get out of it. Once you enter there you are on thin ice and are compromising your beliefs. Is it possible for a corporation to be socially just? Is not it antithetical to their existence—this is an open question. A did you answer the question on the questionairre? A no A what would have happened A we are discussing it A we need another 5 minutes of your tea break to continue A. panel should respond Dean: We do not invite the corporation, but a person can come even if they äre in a corporation’ Craig as soon as we say we äre bringing a corporation then weave defined them, but they could come on their own Caroline: lets move beyond this to service learning—they häve critiqued development—important—sensetive—development work is being done by EWB—ESJP can ask how this can be done in a way we have social justice and not the old forms of exploitation’ Andres: we want to establish and consolidate a course for training in university and the community. One of the dangers of this kind of work is volunteerism. We can use money from corporations etc and go in the communities and you see poverty which is different than in the US in Bogata, you go back and you do work that is better. Organizations can end up reinforcing the north south divide by having courses in the north and intervention in the south.’ Lizzie: we welcome comments and critiques. And feedback. Perhaps my presentation was mis-framed for this forum. Caroline: I would nät say that. A: no, not misframed. One aspect of the struggle for social justice is challenging the social constraints and sometimes we work within them rather than change the constraints via revolution. A I echo that and framing was appropriate. Each individual effort is in the context of an organization and the constraints. We call those who go against the grain whistleblowers and EWB are future whistleblowers. A we live in the UK in strange political times red toryism—no society to big society—social justice understandings are being articulated elsewhere than corporations including the state and they also want to get engaged in this and we should bear them in mind too not just the usual suspects.

Tags: Dean Nieusma, EWB, PAR, service-learning