Integrating Social Justice into Engineering Education from the Margins: Guidelines for Addressing Sources of Faculty Resistance to Social Justice Education

A more socially just engineering profession will necessitate multiple changes to its pipeline—engineering education. If social justice education is to extend across and within the content of the engineering curriculum, it will need to inform and reform multiple educational components: foundational, design and engineering science—as well as humanities and social science—curricula. This chapter identifies common sources of faculty resistance to integrating social justice education in one of those curricular components: humanities and social science pedagogy and content. To facilitate the integration of social justice education in humanities and social science curricula within engineering education, this chapter proposes guidelines that address those sources of resistance. Although initially designed for humanities and social science curricula, the guidelines proposed here have multiple implications for addressing faculty resistance across the entire engineering curriculum. The chapter concludes with an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the guidelines.

[1]  M. Fullan.  The New Meaning of Educational Change , 1990 .

[2]  Rose M. Marra,et al.  Leaving Engineering: A Multi‐Year Single Institution Study , 2012 .

[3]  Dalton,et al.  Mahatma Gandhi Selected Political Writings , 1996 .

[4]  Donna Riley,et al.  Engineering and Social Justice , 2008, Engineering and Social Justice.

[5]  Robert Birnbaum.  How Colleges Work: The Cybernetics of Academic Organization and Leadership , 1988 .

[6]  Gordon Ellis,et al.  Grand challenges for engineering , 2009, IEEE Engineering Management Review.

[7]  Juan C. Lucena,et al.  Are Engineering and Social Justice (In)commensurable? A Theoretical Exploration of Macro-Sociological Frameworks , 2012, Int. J. Eng. Soc. Justice Peace.

[8]  Caroline A. Baillie,et al.  Engineers within a Local and Global Society , 2006, Engineers within a Local and Global Society.

[9]  Christopher Thaiss,et al.  WAC for the New Millennium: Strategies for Continuing Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Programs. , 2001 .

[10]  Henry A. Giroux.  Counternarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces , 1996 .

[11]  T. P. Hughes,et al.  The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology , 1989 .

[12]  B. Newberry.  Are engineers instrumentalists , 2007 .

[13]  Donna Riley.  Engineering Thermodynamics and 21st Century Energy Problems: A Textbook Companion for Student Engagement , 2011, Engineering Thermodynamics and 21st Century Energy Problems.

[14]  D. Milovanović,et al.  Social Justice: Theories, Issues, and Movements , 2007 .

[15]  Caroline A. Baillie,et al.  Needs and Feasibility: A Guide for Engineers in Community Projects - The Case of Waste for Life , 2010, Needs and Feasibility: A Guide for Engineers in Community Projects.

[16]  Jan H. F. Meyer,et al.  Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning , 2010 .

[17]  Jan H. F. Meyer,et al.  Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge , 2006 .

[18]  Susan H. McLeod.  Writing across the Curriculum: The Second Stage, and Beyond. , 1989 .

[19]  S. Hacker.  The culture of engineering: Woman, workplace and machine , 1981 .

[20]  Wilbert E. Moore,et al.  Some Principles of Stratification , 1945 .

[21]  Brian Barry,et al.  Why Social Justice Matters , 2005 .

[22]  W. Faulkner.  Dualisms, Hierarchies and Gender in Engineering , 2000 .

[23]  P. Mcintosh.  White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. , 2003 .

[24]  David H. DeVorkin,et al.  Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance , 1990 .

[25]  Adrianna Kezar,et al.  Understanding and facilitating organizational change in the 21st century : recent research and conceptualizations , 2001 .

[26]  by George A. Theodorson and Achilles G. Theodorson.  A modern dictionary of sociology , 1969 .

[27]  Donna Riley.  We've Been Framed! Ends, Means, and the Ethics of the Grand(iose) Challenges , 2012, Int. J. Eng. Soc. Justice Peace.

[28]  R. Volti,et al.  Society and Technological Change , 1988 .

[29]  Paul M. Santi,et al.  Optimizing Faculty Use of Writing as a Learning Tool in Geoscience Education , 2006 .

[30]  John C. Bean,et al.  Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom , 2011 .

[31]  S. Traweek,et al.  Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists , 1988 .

[32]  B. Latour.  Science in action : how to follow scientists and engineers through society , 1989 .

[33]  B. Hooks.  Teaching to transgress : education as the practice of freedom , 1994 .

[34]  Alison Wolf,et al.  Contemporary Sociological Theory: Expanding the Classical Tradition , 1986 .

[35]  Jun Xing,et al.  Teaching for Change: The Difference, Power, and Discrimination Model. , 2006 .

[36]  Erin A. Cech,et al.  The (Mis)Framing of Social Justice: Why Ideologies of Depoliticization and Meritocracy Hinder Engineers’ Ability to Think About Social Injustices , 2013 .

[37]  K. Knorr-Cetina,et al.  Epistemic cultures : how the sciences make knowledge , 1999 .

[38]  D. Stone.  Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making , 1997 .

[39]  Peter J. Taylor,et al.  Co-Construction and Process: A Response to Sismondo's Classification of Constructivisms , 1995 .

[40]  Roman Graf,et al.  Social justice education : inviting faculty to transform their institutions , 2009 .

[41]  Jon A. Leydens,et al.  Innovations in Composition Programs that Educate Engineers: Drivers, Opportunities, and Challenges , 2009 .

[42]  Peggy McIntosh,et al.  White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies. Working Paper No. 189. , 1988 .

[43]  Lee Anne Bell,et al.  Storytelling for Social Justice: Connecting Narrative and the Arts in Antiracist Teaching , 2010 .

[44]  B. Latour,et al.  Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts , 1979 .