Engineering Education as the Development of Critical Sociotechnical Literacy

By: Veronica Cassone McGowan, Ph.D., Instructor and Research Scientist, School of Educational Studies, University of Washington Bothell
Marcia Ventura, M.Ed., 5th Grade Teacher, Seattle (WA) Public Schools
Philip Bell, Ph.D., Professor, College of Education, University of Washington

Students constructing a causal-loop model in order to see the connections between social and technical aspects of the Ebola outbreak.

Recent educational policy documents position engineering as a way to broaden participation for students in STEM fields (NRC, 2012; NGSS Lead States, 2013). However, a recent review of literature on engineering education found that fewer than 1% of reviewed articles focused on issues of equity and broadening participation (Hynes et al., 2017). For this reason, there are few frameworks to build on when designing for equitable and justice-centered engineering instruction in K-12 settings.

Diversifying participation in engineering means that we need to not just bring learners into existing engineering practices, structures, and ways of knowing. Instead, we need to take a critical look at the field of engineering education and challenge researchers and educators to create learning opportunities that build on diverse ways of knowing about engineering and being engineers in the world (Wright et al., 2018). We can help accomplish this by deeply relating course experiences and engineering design challenges to learners’ everyday lives (McGowan et al., 2017).

In our research (McGowan & Bell, 2020), we leveraged the diverse histories, epistemologies, and ways of knowing in engineering to critically engage learners with engineering in K-12 settings, as we asked the question, “How can we design learning environments to help students critically understand the intrinsic and systemic sociotechnical relationships between people, communities, and the built environment?” To answer this question, we introduced the term and outlined an instructional framework for developing learners’ critical sociotechnical literacy, which is a place-based approach for critically engaging learners in understanding the impacts of engineering, technology, and urban planning on their own communities and everyday lives in order to design justice-centered solutions for real-world problems both locally and globally. As shown in Figure 1, critical sociotechnical literacy is located at the intersection of critical design theory (Riley, 2008; Dunne and Raby, 2013) and critical pedagogies of place (Gruenewald, 2003) by asking learners to critique designed objects and spaces in order to re-imagine and re-make them for more just and equitable futures. In this work we hope to advance a critique of the ways K-12 engineering education may limit or expand the possibilities for broadening participation, address social justice, and provide opportunities for students to use engineering in their everyday lives.

Figure 1

Cultivating Critical Sociotechnical Literacy

As a situated, synthetic, and place-based endeavor, engineering knowledge and engineered artifacts exist within complex sociotechnical systems (Adams et al., 2011). For example, dams exist within landscapes that include entanglements of humans and non-human relations, and medical devices are used within regimes and systems of healthcare provision and practice. Research in support of socially situating engineering considers how engineers and planners historically have designed artifacts, spaces, and processes for public use as part of profit and client-driven design practices without taking into account the greater public good or the social impacts of their designs (Riley, 2008; Nieusma and Riley, 2010; Pawley, 2012). For this reason, research on equity and justice-centered engineering argues that engineers and engineering students need to ask, “Solving problems for whom?” as part of the engineering problem solving process (Riley, 2008).

In K-12 contexts, surfacing the sociotechnical and justice-oriented aspects of engineering invites educators and curriculum designers to use transdisciplinary approaches to instruction that move past applied-science models of engineering to include the broad historic and epistemic framings of engineering as design, craft, and social science (Figueiredo, 2008). Through this transdisciplinary lens, educators and learners engage in engineering endeavors that surface and evaluate the impacts of their designs on people and communities. Teaching learners of all ages to reflect on the human dimensions of engineering design is central to critical, equitable, and justice-centered approaches to engineering instruction.

The practical and material nature of our designed world means that design thinking practices become embodied in the people and places in which they are created (Suchman, 2000). People make useful things in specific places. The materiality of engineered artifacts also means that they serve as models that can readily perpetuate the cultural and historic values of dominant ideas in the field itself. Without engaging learners in critically examining what values and power structures are embodied in specific designed artifacts, these ideas become reified over time. For this reason, equitable approaches to engineering instruction require that students engage in multiple dimensions of engineering learning that include reading the designed world to understand the powered histories embodied in artifacts and spaces. Critical sociotechnical literacy is the practice of learning to read the designed world for these patterns in order to deconstruct and reconstruct these spaces for equity, justice, and health.

Below we outline a framework for and provide two examples of cultivating critical sociotechnical literacy in K-12 settings. This framework emerged from an extended research-practice partnership engaged in design-based research in a linguistically and culturally diverse fifth-grade classroom in the Pacific Northwest, in which we iteratively designed and tested engineering and science curricula and instructional approaches that were aimed at critically engaging learners in sociotechnical issues related to technology, engineering, and urban planning in their everyday lives. Our underlying stance in this research is that all engineering instruction is ultimately a political endeavor (Freire, 1996; Riley, 2008; Claris and Riley, 2012), and therefore engineering learning environments should invite learners to surface, critique, and engage in design in relation to the social and political implications of engineering on local, national, and global communities.

A Framework for Developing Critical Sociotechnical Literacy during Justice-Centered Engineering Instruction

1. Choose Complex Anchoring Phenomena that Situate Engineering and Urban Planning in Social and Historical Contexts.

2. Ground Learning in Students’ Everyday Knowledges, Interests, and Experiences.

3. Include Community and Disciplinary Experts to Surface Critical Sociotechnical Connections and Histories.

4. Connect Phenomena and Learning Across Settings by Observing and Comparing Designed Objects and Spaces at School, in Students’ Communities, on Field Trips, and Virtually.

5. Engage Students in Professional and Culturally Grounded Engineering Practices for Critical Problem Scoping and Problem Solving with a Focus on Complex Systems Modeling.

Examples from the Classroom

Our justice-focused engineering instruction began with choosing anchoring phenomena that situated engineering within a complex, place-based sociotechnical framework. We used local and global case studies to engage learners in considering the entangled social, historical, and powered dynamics of each case. Each of our chosen phenomena connected to district-wide science curriculum and grade-level learning goals and emerged through a focus on current events that were personally-consequential to students. These dimensions provided important rationales and relevancies for engaging in engineering instruction. For fifth graders in this district, the three topical strands of science learning focused on landforms, forces and motion, and human health.

Local Case Study: The Elwha Dam

Our Elwha Dam case study investigation explored how the U.S. government, settlers and foreign investors throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries forcibly removed members of Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe from their lands—which included access to land-based knowledge, relations and resources—in order to build a dam to power the settler logging community of Port Angeles in 1910. In this case study students asked, “Who benefited from the construction of the Elwha Dam and at what costs to the Indigenous communities and futures in the area?” As part of the problem-scoping process students investigated how land and land rights relate to resources they use in their everyday lives, invited tribal members (who were also family members) to the class to discuss their perspectives of the dam removal and restoration process, and visited their local watershed to understand the relationship between water management, infrastructure, and ecosystem and human health. The critical sociotechnical learning for this case study was for students to see that land is more than a resource; that it is embodied knowledge, history, and ways of being for Indigenous communities. Through this case study, students came to recognize that all infrastructure projects take place on Indigenous lands and that just engineering practices should include Indigenous community members’ voices and consent in the planning and execution of all land-based engineering work and should honor the value of oral traditions, like storytelling, as sources of evidence for technological decision making (Friesen & Herrmann, 2018).

Global Case Study: Outbreaks and Clean Water Infrastructure

Our second case study centered on the 2015 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Through the Ebola investigation students learned about disease transmission and how rates and severity of transmission are related to the availability of clean water and water-related infrastructure (e.g., storage, transportation, reclamation, treatment). For this engineering investigation we engaged with guest speakers from Doctors Without Borders and the U.S. military who had served as healthcare workers in Liberia at the height of the epidemic. Experts helped students answer the guiding question, “Why did Ebola become an epidemic in West Africa when it did not even spread to family members in the U.S?” Speakers surfaced the intrinsic connections between wastewater infrastructure, indoor plumbing, clean water, and public health. One speaker from Doctors Without Borders shared that the simple ability to wash hands and use indoor plumbing protected family members in the U.S. and the lack of such infrastructure made even protected healthcare workers vulnerable to the disease in West Africa. This speaker also related the lack of infrastructure in West Africa was due to political instability throughout the 1980s and early 2000s. In this case, expert knowledge enabled students to situate engineering decisions, infrastructure, resource allocation, and health within political and historicized contexts. This motivated students to design a service project to send care packages to healthcare workers in Liberia in order to reduce the spread of the disease in Ebola clinics. Watch the video about this project.

Findings

We found that engaging students in complex systems modeling was key to designing justice-oriented solutions. In each of these case studies, students used causal-loop models to situate engineering phenomena within complex, place-based sociotechnical systems. Students constructed and regularly revised their models to identify variables for change and agency within the complex network of actors and artifacts in these systems. These models supported students’ ongoing sensemaking of complex sociotechnical topics and grounded students’ justice-oriented action work throughout the year. Student projects for these case studies and other engineering units included designing rain gardens to filter runoff and sediment from rainwater to support salmon health, sending care packages to healthcare workers during the Ebola crisis, creating podcasts and public information flyers to communicate the importance and safety of measles vaccines for public health, and working against Indigenous erasure and advocating for Indigenous sovereignty in all land-based engineering design work.

Implications

The performative nature of engineered artifacts and spaces can be leveraged to teach students how to critique the designed world in ways that enable them to see how broader sociological constructs are related to quality of life, health, and personal and collective agency. Critical sociotechnical literacy surfaces the interconnectedness and complexity of living in a sociotechnical world, where design frequently privileges some individuals at the expense of others. The NGSS Science, Technology, Society, and the Environment standards (Lead States, 2013) engage students in investigating how things work and how designs are used and applied. Critical sociotechnical literacy adds to this framework by encouraging teachers and students to ask, “Who benefits from this design, and at what cost?” In order to cultivate students’ critical sociotechnical literacy in the classroom, teachers and curriculum designers should position engineering as a place-based, socially-situated endeavor, and should engage youth in critically evaluating the impacts of engineering and urban planning in their own communities and beyond with a focus on how solutions—developed through powered dynamics and historically-rooted narratives and systems—impact the people and places in which they are created. Most importantly, teachers should engage learners in imagining and speculating on how engineering can be a pathway for designing more just, thriving, and sustainable futures, especially for communities that have been most negatively impacted by the consequence of planning and design.

Educator Resources: Through the NSF-funded STEM Teaching Tools initiative, we have published a range of educator resources related to the following categories and to the work in this article:

This work is funded by the NSF under DRL 1238253. However, all opinions are strictly our own. We extend deep gratitude to the instructors, community members, and youth who participated in this study.

References

Adams, R., Evangelou, D., English, L., Figueiredo, A. D., Mousoulides, N., Pawley, A. L., Schiefellite, C., et al. (2011). Multiple perspectives on engaging future engineers. Journal of Engineering Education, 100(1), 48– 88.

Claris, L., & Riley, D. (2012). Situation critical: critical theory and critical thinking in engineering education. Engineering Studies, 4(2), 101–120.

Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. MIT press.

Figueiredo, A. D. (2008). Toward an epistemology of engineering. In D. Goldberg & N. McCarthy (Eds.), Proceedings workshop on philosophy & engineering (WPE 2008) (pp. 94–95). London: Royal Engineering Academy.

Freire, P. (2013). Pedagogy of the oppressed. In The applied theatre reader (pp. 310–313). London: Taylor and Francis.

Friesen, M. R., & Herrmann, R. (2018). Indigenous knowledge, perspectives, and design principles in the engineering curriculum. Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA).

Gruenewald, D. (2003). The best of both worlds: a critical pedagogy of place. Educational Researcher, 32(4), 3– 12.

Hynes, M. M., Mathis, C., Purzer, S., Rynearson, A., & Siverling, E. (2017). Systematic review of research in P-12 engineering education from 2000–2015. International Journal of Engineering Education, 33(1), 453–462.

McGowan, V. C., Ventura, M., & Bell, P. (2017). Reverse Engineering. Science and Children, 54(8), 68.

McGowan, V. C., & Bell, P. (2020). Engineering Education as the Development of Critical Sociotechnical Literacy. Science & Education, 29(4), 981-1005.

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Pawley, A. L. (2012). What counts as “engineering”: Toward a redefinition. In C. Baillie, A. Pawley, & D. Riley (Eds.), Engineering and social justice: In the university and beyond. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

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Wright, C., Wendell, K. B., & Paugh, P. P. (2018). “Just put it together to make no commotion:” Re-imagining Urban Elementary Students’ Participation in Engineering Design Practices. International Journal of Education in Mathematics, Science and Technology, 6(3), 285-301

Veronica Cassone McGowan, Ph.D., Instructor and Research Scientist, School of Educational Studies, University of Washington Bothell
vmcgowan@uw.edu

Veronica Cassone McGowan is a faculty member at the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington (UW) Bothell and research scientist at the Goodland Institute for Educational Renewal. She received her doctorate in Learning Sciences and Human Development from UW where she worked as a graduate researcher for the UW Institute for Science & Math Education and the LIFE Science of Learning Center. Her research focuses on broadening participation in STEM fields, particularly K-12 engineering and science education, with a focus on connecting learning across settings in ways that incorporate learners’ everyday interests, identities and community knowledges as foundations for sociotechnical and socioecological learning. McGowan has a background in ecology and ecological modeling with over 20 years of teaching experience across K-12, informal and higher education settings.

Marcia Ventura, M.Ed., 5th Grade Teacher, Seattle (WA) Public Schools
mrventura@seattleschools.org

Marcia Ventura is a 5th grade teacher with Seattle Public Schools and an Elementary Science Methods Instructor at the University of Washington. She has been teaching elementary students for 21 years, and has worked in partnership with researchers for over 13 years in order to create equitable science and engineering opportunities for students in her own classroom and beyond. She received her Master’s in Education from Antioch University. Ventura is interested in designing science learning environments that build on students’ everyday and community ways of knowing, and engaging students in justice-oriented learning around local issues.

Philip Bell, Ph.D., Professor, College of Education, University of Washington
pbell@uw.edu

Philip Bell is Professor and Area Chair of Learning Sciences & Human Development in the College of Education at the University of Washington in Seattle where he holds the Shauna C. Larson Endowed Chair in Learning Sciences. His current research focuses on understanding and resourcing equity improvements in PK-12 science education—with a key focus on promoting climate and environmental justice across scales of educational implementation. Working from his position as a white settler scholar, he seeks to promote equitable STEM learning within and across settings in ways that are personally consequential to learners and their communities through culturally responsive and resurgent pedagogies. He has worked with families and communities in their home settings and neighborhoods, in classrooms and informal education programs, in educational contexts governed by Indigenous nations and communities, and across school districts and national networks in partnership with teachers and educational leaders. Since 2008 he has directed the UW Institute for Science & Math Education focused on promoting equity and justice in PK-12 STEM education through partnerships between the university, community organizations, and educational institutions. Bell also edits a popular collection of professional learning resources called STEM Teaching Tools.