Drones for Good: How to Bring Sociotechnical Thinking into the Classroom

Hoople, Gordon D.; Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin

doi:10.2200/s00984ed1v01y202001ets024

Cited by 16 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…While institutions of higher education across the U.S. experienced the phenomenon of COVID-19 and the rapid implementation of ERT, based upon the literature on crisis management in higher education we believe that the particular way faculty members and students adapted within the department of Integrated Engineering at the University of San Diego (USD) within the United States is a compelling case that it is important to highlight. Given the disciplinary culture of engineering, which is highly technical, emotionless, rigorous, meritocratic, and depoliticized [43,44], we wanted to provide a counter to traditional engineering pedagogy that is sociotechnical and grounded in compassion [45][46][47][48]. Given the large number of engineering students that have reported negative reactions to ERT during COVID-19 [36,37], we describe an approach that provides valuable insights about the culture of care and compassion not only during uncertain times but permanently in engineering education.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…engineering, which is highly technical, emotionless, rigorous, meritocratic, and depoliticized [43,44], we wanted to provide a counter to traditional engineering pedagogy that is sociotechnical and grounded in compassion [45][46][47][48]. Given the large number of engineering students that have reported negative reactions to ERT during COVID-19 [36,37], we describe an approach that provides valuable insights about the culture of care and compassion not only during uncertain times but permanently in engineering education.…”

Section: University Response To Covid-19mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Compassionate Flexibility and Self-Discipline: Student Adaptation to Emergency Remote Teaching in an Integrated Engineering Energy Course during COVID-19

et al. 2020

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The global pandemic of COVID-19 brought about the transition to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) at higher education institutions across the United States, prompting both students and the faculty to rapidly adjust to a different modality of teaching and learning. Other crises have induced disruptions to academic continuity (e.g., earthquakes, hurricanes), but not to the same extent as COVID-19, which has affected universities on a global scale. In this paper, we describe a qualitative case study where we interviewed 11 second-year Integrated Engineering students during the Spring 2020 semester to explore how they adapted to the transition to remote learning. Our results revealed several student challenges, how they used self-discipline strategies to overcome them, and how the faculty supported students in the classroom through a compassionate and flexible pedagogy. Faculty members showed compassion and flexibility by adjusting the curriculum and assessment and effectively communicating with students. This was especially important for the women participants in this study, who more frequently expressed utilizing pass/fail grading and the personal and gendered challenges they faced due to the pandemic. During this unprecedented crisis, we found that a key element for supporting students’ well-being and success is the faculty members communicating care and incorporating flexibility into their courses.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: University Response To Covid-19mentioning

confidence: 99%

Compassionate Flexibility and Self-Discipline: Student Adaptation to Emergency Remote Teaching in an Integrated Engineering Energy Course during COVID-19

et al. 2020

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“…The course emphasizes the importance of "place" (i.e., learning that is relevant to the local context) [27][28][29][30][31]. Students are exposed to other ways of being, knowing, and doing that deviate from the dominant masculine Western White colonial discourse [32][33][34][35][36][37]. For example, in traditional engineering education contexts, the textbooks and classroom sample problems are often based on stereotypically masculine interests (i.e., cars, sports, and guns), and they skew towards incorporating White male characters [38].…”

Section: Course Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Is Engineering and Who Are Engineers? Student Reflections from a Sustainability-Focused Energy Course

et al. 2022

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In the spring of 2021, the University of San Diego’s Department of Integrated Engineering taught the course, “Integrated Approach to Energy”, the second offering of a new required course, to nine second-year engineering students. The sociotechnical course covered modern energy concepts, with an emphasis on renewable energies and sustainability, and it exposed the students to other ways of being, knowing, and doing that deviated from the dominant masculine Western White colonial discourse. Following the course completion, we interviewed five students by using a semistructured protocol to explore how they perceived of and communicated about engineers and engineering. We sought to identify the takeaways from their course exposure to sustainability and the sociotechnical paradigm, which were central to the course. The findings suggest that the students were beginning to form sociotechnical descriptions, and that they were still developing their understanding and perceptions of engineers and engineering. Moreover, we observed that they were still wrestling with how best to integrate sustainability into those perceptions. There was an a-la-carte feel to the students’ conceptualizations of sustainability as it related to engineering, as in, “you can ‘do’ sustainability with engineering, but do not have to”. We argue that engineering students likely need these pedagogical paradigms (sociotechnical engineering and sustainability) woven through the entirety of their engineering courses if they are to fully accept and integrate them into their own constructs about engineers and engineering.

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“…For this reason, engineering accreditation boards, including CEAB, require university programs to demonstrate that engineering students understand the social dimensions and consequences of engineering practice (Engineers Canada 2019). This has been defined as sociotechnical thinking (Hoople and Choi-Fitzpatrick 2020;Leydens et al 2018;Mazzurco and Daniel 2020), which is a critical skill for engineers due to the sociotechnical nature of engineering practice. Thus, there is good reason for department administrators to actively pursue opportunities to further emphasize the professional graduate attributes, potentially by integrating the teaching of professional skills with the teaching of technical skills to avoid deemphasizing one set of graduate attributes to emphasize another.…”

Section: Recommendations For Programsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using content validity measures to evaluate the Biosystems Engineering Program at the University of Manitoba

Cicek¹,

Renaud²,

Mann³

2022

Can. Biosyst. Eng.

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An exploratory case study was designed to determine the relative importance of the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) graduate attributes as perceived by University of Manitoba engineering stakeholders. Findings were used to examine the content validity of the Biosystems Engineering program. The overarching objective was to explore how graduate attribute emphasis in engineering programs reflect graduate attribute importance reported by key stakeholders. Problem Analysis, Investigation, Design, Communication Skills, Impact of Engineering on Society & the Environment, and Use of Engineering Tools had similar expected (mean relative importance) and observed (content and assessment program coverage) data percentages. The gap was wider for other graduate attributes, with the most surprising being Knowledge Base. Overall, the pattern of results suggests that various professional attributes (e.g., Professionalism, Ethics & Equity, and Lifelong Learning) should be more prominent in content and assessments within an engineering program. Recommendations to improve methods to assess content validity in engineering programs are discussed.

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Drones for Good: How to Bring Sociotechnical Thinking into the Classroom

Cited by 16 publications

References 60 publications

Compassionate Flexibility and Self-Discipline: Student Adaptation to Emergency Remote Teaching in an Integrated Engineering Energy Course during COVID-19

Compassionate Flexibility and Self-Discipline: Student Adaptation to Emergency Remote Teaching in an Integrated Engineering Energy Course during COVID-19

What Is Engineering and Who Are Engineers? Student Reflections from a Sustainability-Focused Energy Course

Using content validity measures to evaluate the Biosystems Engineering Program at the University of Manitoba

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