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Session 5 (Wednesday)

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After a brief hour-long break (tea time — it is England after all!), Jon and Jen talked about designing workshops to help students push past Donna’s “mindsets that serve as barriers to justice“.

They led the group in an exercise that attempted to brainstorm how engineering educators may be taught to push pass those same barriers. During the workshop, three mini-groups asked each other questions on privilege, empathy, integration, and pedagogy.
  • Group 1: Heather from EWB-Queen’s (Canada) spoke about connecting educators with each other and the ESJP network. This would help interest more engineering educators in teaching about justice in their classes.
  • Group 2: Use roleplaying activities to highlight privileges of class, race, etc. Students must form their own values. Educators cannot simply lecture on their own values. Student input can be encouraged through the use of roundtables, buzz groups.
  • Group 3: We questioned whether assuming these mindsets would reinforce them. Use roleplaying to face barriers like the Poverty Challenge.

 

 

Session 4 (Wednesday)

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I’m looking forward to Donna and Katy’s workshop. They’ve started out with talking about Ursula Franklin and scrupling (More here).

They would like the ESJP attendees to scruple about social justice. They asked the audience what experiences do you draw on for your activism, why, and what kinds of actions will you take in the future?
After a brief discussion, they invited attendees to brainstorm action the ESJP collective can take and how we would do that.

Session 3 (Wednesday)

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George Catalano joined us by Skype as we headed into the third session today. After some Skype issues (darn technology!), we switched to just audio and the presentation went well.

George talked about the various conceptions of earth throughout human history: from the Medieval Age in Europe (where women were even lower than plants/animals in the world), to the Copernican model of the universe to the clockwork universe of the scientific revolution before moving on to newer ideas. These newer ideas stress chaos, complexity, interlinking, non-deterministic progress, evolution into different and usually more complex forms.
What can engineers take away from these newer conceptions of the universe? Engineers should reconnect with a bio-spiritual idea of the universe: leave hydrogen alone and it will yield plants and animals. We can use Johnson's concept of the morally deep world and Berry's "communion of subjects".
  • Complex system as "integral community"
  • Nonhumans and ecosystems are morally significants beings with interests and rights
  • Differentiation – emergent diversification from particles to life forms leading to biodiversity
  • Subjectivity – everything has a voice and an inner sense
  • Community — every atom in the universe is immediately influencing every other atom in the Universe, no matter how distant

George then led us in "imagine" sessions which had us imagining what our conference would look like without differentiation, subjectivity, and community.