Dr. Paul Lusina (Lecturer, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science), Dr. Christoph Sielmann (Assistant Professor of Teaching, Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science) and Dr. Angèle Beausoleil (Assistant Professor of Teaching, Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Marketing & Behavioural Science Division, Entrepreneurship & Innovation Group, Sauder School of Business) are Sustainability Education Fellows. They received funding to develop a curriculum project called Engineering Critical Design Practice: Engaging Engineering Students for Radical Change.
Q. Before we dive into discussing the project you're working on, Engineering Critical Design Practice: Engaging Engineering Students for Radical Change, what motivates and inspires you to work in sustainability?
A. Engineering students are exploring technologies that are initiating a myriad of changes in how we interact with the world and with each other. While change can be exciting, we have also noticed the stress and anxiety that many of our students feel when contemplating their career and their future.
"We have an opportunity and an obligation to help our students navigate these uncertainties, especially in the context of their profession. For us, this means engaging students with social and environmental issues and providing them with decision-making tools that will supplement their technical expertise. We need to provide pathways for students to recognize their agency and mitigate some of their anxiety."
What we’re attempting is a part of a much larger paradigm shift that is taking place across UBC and in many other institutions. This is reflected by the Sustainability Education Fellows program, CTLT and the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA). This community of educators has provided support and encouragement to us. Sustainability is a fascinating area that exists in the cross-section of many disciplines including ethics, technology, economics, and politics. Given its deeply interdisciplinary nature and embedded values, it presents unique and exciting opportunities to explore new ways of teaching that challenge students to reimagine their understanding and appreciation of the civilized world.
Q. What keeps you up at night, and how are you addressing it through your current work in Engineering and in Sauder?
A. The engineering students we graduate today will become the decision-makers in our society who confront current and emerging social and environmental challenges. We dread the possibility that through our inaction as educators, our students exacerbate rather than improve the social and environmental challenges we are currently facing. There are far too many examples of engineering institutions or individuals who have used technology for short-term gains at the expense of others and the environment.
We also worry that ignorance and a lack of empathy can result from the incorrect application of artificial intelligence technologies. While these tools are fantastic in augmenting engineering practice, there is a temptation to abdicate our decisions to AI and propagate existing stereotypes and biases.
Part of our strategy to address these threats is by incorporating values-oriented, holistic methods of problem formulation that are practiced in business, especially in entrepreneurship. A successful start-up must identify and empathize with the challenges faced by their customers and take a macro look at how their business fits into the economy. By taking problem formulation techniques practiced in entrepreneurship and incorporating them into the problem formulation step in the engineering design process, we can authentically teach these topics to our students.
Q. Can you tell us about the curriculum project you're developing, what is it about? and what do you hope to achieve? (What is the Radical Change you are looking for, and what students do you want to reach?)
A. We approach the course with the understanding that hidden curricula abound not only in what we teach, but how we teach. As a public institution, we operate with a mandate to be “values neutral" on narratives that intersect with politics. As engineering programs, we often take this further to operate with a mild, even derisive neglect for the social dimension of engineering design, known as the “neutrality problem” in engineering. We tell our students that it’s important to consider personal biases when making decisions to facilitate objectivity, but we fail to do the same in our own curricula design. Radical pedagogy means taking our own advice and approaching course design with awareness of present-day cultural, political, and ontological biases inherent in how we teach and what we teach. We acknowledge the failings of artificially sterile, reductionist models of technology design and the dehumanizing process that our students experience through years of training to divorce their design decisions from the lives they will affect. We accept that there is no such thing as values neutral" design. Our goal is to engage students in a process of problem definition that is intrinsically reflective and integrative of the ontology generally externalized through conventional design. In this way, we hope to restore some humanity to these students and connect their learning to the uniquely meaningful impact that they individually seek to make in the world.
"Engineering education in Canada is going through a transformation. We see ourselves as proponents for more integrated and less siloed approaches for teaching engineering content. For us, this means developing engineering courses that embed aspects of ethics, society, environment and culture into the core engineering activity of designing solutions to problems."
Our course focuses on the ‘problem formulation’ step of the engineering design process as a natural way to incorporate some of these less typical concepts. The problem defines the goals, metrics for success, and scope. It determines who is involved and excluded from the solution and influences what costs are acceptable.
The course consists of four main themes. The first theme ‘Environment & Social Ecosystems’ examines historical engineering designs in terms of their social and environmental implications with an emphasis on affective learning. In other words, students are challenged to relate the impacts of the engineering design to their personal experiences. In this way we encourage students to see the value and importance of these topics.
The second theme is ‘Ethical Decision-making’. We explore several different ethical traditions from different cultures. The goal here is to provide students frameworks and perspectives that they can incorporate when evaluating the outcome of an engineering design, or in formulating an engineering question.
The third theme, ‘Critical Engineering Design’ introduces students to design-thinking techniques that use contextual and experiential information to formulate a problem hypothesis. This is also an opportunity for students to apply the ethical frameworks in both describing the problem and justifying their approach.
The final theme explores ‘Critical Hope’. Here, we reflect on the previous three themes and relate them to current engineering practice. Our goal is for students to identify areas where the profession can improve, and to foster a sense of agency.
An ideal outcome for us is that our students have a foundation in understanding the significant social and environmental challenges and the motivation and means to apply their learning to their professional practice.
Q. Why do you believe students will benefit from taking this work? How do you think it will help prepare them for their future careers?
A. From a professional point of view, we recognize that many low to mid-level technical aspects of engineering will be either partially or completely replaced by AI applications. As a result, the value of engineers will increasingly be in their ability to think critically about the application of technology and to oversee how these AI tools are used. This critical and contextual thinking ability is consistently mentioned by employers as important, yet engineering students are not taught formal critical thinking skills in most engineering programs as scientific thinking is widely considered to be an acceptable substitute. Unfortunately, scientific thinking fails to adequately address complex and values-driven problems prevalent in sociotechnical analysis found in domains such as sustainable design.
"For students personally, the frameworks and tools we introduce should help them scaffold and articulate the problems that they face to understand them in a wider context. When we can name or describe a crisis, it can mitigate the associated fear and uncertainty."
Finally, in terms of society we need more people, especially those destined for leadership roles, to care about technology’s implications on society and the environment. We hope that our students will be a catalyst for a broader change in engineering practice.
Q. The Sustainability Fellows Education Program offers curriculum grants and a faculty cohort experience to interdisciplinary teams. What has been the most valuable aspect of this program for you and your team so far in this first year?
A. The cohort of sustainability fellows has been hugely influential in the development of our course. In terms of the technical aspects of our course, we’ve seen how other departments from across the university are addressing the various aspects of sustainability. As a result, we’ve received insightful suggestions on what works, what doesn’t, and where to find more information.
Equally as valuable is the sense of community the faculty cohort has provided. This has provided validation for our course concept and encouragement as we attempt the novel experiment in engineering education.
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