Cynthia and Deborah led the attendees in a workshop to show how they lead students to consider social context in engineering projects. The first question they asked the audience is what types of information would they ask in deciding where a company’s new factory would be located among three locations: rural Alabama in the US, suburbs of Chicago, in Thailand. They talked about their research program, CELT, which looks at:
- What does the design process look like? When and how much problem scoping and information is needed to complete a design?
They asked students to talk about floods in the midwest US and what they would do to address the problem. Most students concentrated on the technical factors of the problem and mostly technical problem associated with the immediate design solution (not even technical issues outside of the immediate design).
Gender differences: Women cited more broad factors than men.
Donna pointed to a study “Trained to Disengage” that was presented at the ASEE conference that showed how students over the course of their engineering education career become more politically disengaged.
When students did look at the stakeholders of the project, many more of them were concerned about shareholders & employees of the company. Clients never even came up! When thinking of space, students were concerned about the company and space for the employees but also the local community. Students wanted to know primarily about cost/logistics of the factory but very little wanted to know about environmental impacts. Students were shown this data and many of them were surprised at the different ways of designing and claimed that broader thinking would be helpful.
Then connections between context and justice were made for the students by asking them questions such as:
- How is the community impacted socially and environmentally by the factory?
- How will the working conditions of the employees be decided? How would a new factory affect them?
Students responded with saying that such an exercise was “difficult” and “weird”. Some of them did say though that the problem was “interesting” and it made them think about engineering in a new way.
Finally, Cynthia and Deborah asked the attendees “how an assessment technique like the one they discussed [assessment of context considerations] be revised and extended to encourage reflection/dialogue/learning about social justice”.
Jon answered by saying we can build in “social impact” throughout the course as in a design course instead of being an add-on.
Arias recommended that instead of three far away places for factory location, three locations more familiar to the students could be picked. That way the example is authentic for them. He added that we can’t always tell engineering students that THEY have the decision. Engineers should not be taught within the context of expert power.