Abstract
The goals of this book are to begin mapping and charting new territory for scholarship/activism in engineering and social justice (ESJ) and to attempt new connections and strategies in what is perhaps one of the most traditional and resistant-to-change areas of higher education: engineering education. The reasons for this resistance are complex and many and have been studied by scholars from historic (Wisnioski 2012) and organizational (Merton et al. 2004) perspectives. My own book (Lucena 2005) documents how historical events –mainly Sputnik, the Cold War, the end of the Cold War, the emergence of global economic competition- shaped the socio-political environment of the US and brought significant changes to engineering education. In this book, it became very clear that change in engineering education is difficult and elusive. So if significant geopolitical and/or economic events are needed to bring change to engineering education, what hope does the group of scholars committed to ESJ represented in this book have to bring any change to engineering education for the goals of social justice?
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Notes
- 1.
See Prince (2004) for a comprehensive review of experiential and active learning strategies in engineering education.
- 2.
For example, see McLoughlin (2012) for a detailed analysis of the challenges that community college students face when transferring into engineering programs.
- 3.
See Intertribal Climate Change Working Group (2009) for comprehensive analysis of how climate change affects tribal communities disproportionately.
- 4.
James Huff, a doctoral student in engineering education at Purdue University and assistant director of Purdue’s EPICS program, is undertaking research on how engineering students integrate the technical and social dimensions of their education.
- 5.
See Lucena (2005), especially chapter 4, for a history of how since the late 1980s economic competitiveness has become the main preoccupation of engineering educators after engineering policymakers introduced the “pipeline” as a conceptual model to quantify the number of students, and their behaviors (interest, recruitment, attrition, graduation, continuation into the workforce, etc), going into STEM fields. This preoccupation still persists today at the highest levels of policymaking (see Anon. 2011).
- 6.
See chapter 3 in Lucena et al. (2010) where we question the validity of these assumptions. Also, see Lucena (2013) where I question the implications of engineers viewing people as “clients” especially when designing in a relationship of care such as the one that exist between engineers and disabled people.
- 7.
I have begun experimenting in my engineering classes with the work of Dr. Rachel Remen on the difference between help vs. service and on the need to restore a sense of service in the professions in order to counteract what Donna M. Riley has accurately labeled “the desire to help and the persistence to do it” as one of the engineering mindsets that blind students from seeing social injustices. See Remen (2001).
- 8.
Donna M. Riley has outlined these engineering mindsets as (1) dominance of military and corporate organizations, (2) uncritical acceptance of authority, (3) positivism and the myth of objectivity, (4) desire to help and the persistence to do it, and (5) technical narrowness (Riley 2008).
- 9.
See Nieusma and Riley (2010) for a thoughtful analysis of how these projects might make injustices invisible to students and, in some cases, actually reinforce injustices.
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Lucena, J. (2013). The Road Ahead: Questions and Pathways for Future Teaching and Research in ESJ. In: Lucena, J. (eds) Engineering Education for Social Justice. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6350-0_13
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