Emotions in engineering education: Towards a research agenda

Emotions in Engineering Education: Preliminary Results from a Scoping Review

“…During the past two decades, engineering programs, professional societies, and accrediting bodies have increasingly acknowledged the importance of emotions in engineering education and practice-which is supported by research on, for example, engineering ethics, social justice, risk management, problem solving, student development, and retention (Hess et al, 2020;Kellam et al, 2018;Roeser, 2012), as well as the wider educational literature (Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2014). In fact, research interest in EEE is increasing rapidly (Lönngren et al, 2020) and in April 2020, the authors gathered at an international symposium to formulate a research agenda for this emerging field. However, we realized that we first needed a comprehensive overview over existing research, which did not exist yet.…”

Investigating culturally contextualized making with the Navajo Nation

“…In contrast, engineering from a Western perspective is purely technical; emotions and social aspects are outside of engineering (Cech, 2014;Kuhn, 1998;Niles et al, 2020). Research on emotions in engineering education has largely focused on negative emotions, such as studies on shame as related to a sense of belonging (Beckmon et al, 2019;Huff et al, 2020;Sharbine et al, 2020), and the role of negative emotions on motivation and academic performance (Lönngren et al, 2020;Villanueva et al, 2018). Perhaps more attention should be placed on the role positive feelings have while engaging in the engineering design process, as there is empirical evidence that positive feelings can enhance one's creative problem-solving ability (Isen et al, 1987).…”

A Multi-level Review of Engineering Ethics Education: Towards a Socio-technical Orientation of Engineering Education for Ethics

“…Considering how values, as well as modes of use and interaction, can be implicitly or explicitly inscribed into engineering artefacts at the design stage (van de Poel & Verbeek, 2006;Verbeek, 2008) Moral agency and action Responding wisely and responsibly to situations in a way that satisfies as many potentially Competing constraints as possible (Whitbeck, 1995) Empowering students to reshape the social, economic and legal context of practice (Conlon & Zandvoort, 2011) Encouraging students to take an activist stance "for what is right, good and just" (Hodson, 1999) Inspire the engineers of the future to challenge the status quo and to strengthen the profession (Lawlor, 2021) Moral character and virtuous development Increasing students' ethical willpower (Davis, 1999;Harris et al, 1996) Cultivating students' sense of professional identity (Loui, 2005;Miller, 2018) Cultivating virtues, such as respect for nature for engaging in environment-friendly engineering (Harris et al, 2019), phronesis for identifying certain decision situations and actions as ethically relevant (Frigo et al, 2021), objectivity, care and honesty (Moriarty, 2009;Nair & Bulleit, 2020) Moral emotional development Reflecting on the role of emotions in the development and acceptability of risky technologies (Roeser, 2012) or in the effects of climate change (Lönngren et al, 2020) Engaging learners in their emotional life as to develop a sense of empathy with people across physical, social and cultural distances and a language for emotions (Tormey, 2005;Hess & Fila, 2016;Hess et al, 2017) Moral situatedness Understanding the social relations of expertise in connection with technology management and decision-making (Devon, 1999) Helping students situate their work in its contribution to their community (Haws, 2001) Acknowledging the social dimension of engineering practice (Martin et al, 2019) *Category borrowed from Vande Poel and Royakkers (2011) the future engineer to develop certain character traits or virtues. Virtue ethics has been posited as a more appropriate frame to convey aspects of engineering professionalism, such as sensitivity to risk, awareness of the social context of technology, respect for nature and commitment to the public...…”

“…These cultural characteristics of engineering are seen to, on one hand, influence the development of an engineering identity as “nuts and bolts” technicists (Faulkner, 2007 ), according to which engineers are distinguished as an occupational group in light of their technical and scientific expertise (Trevelyan, 2014 ; Meiksins, 2007 , p. 122), and on the other hand, are reflected in the overemphasis of technical and scientific aspects in the engineering curriculum to the exclusion of ethical and societal concerns (Bucciarelli, 2008 ; Jamison et al, 2014 ; Johnston et al, 1996 ; Stevens et al, 2007 ). The culture of engineering education appears to promote the dichotomy between “hard” and “soft” skills (Martin, 2020 ), according to which ethics is a “fuzzy” subject (McGinn, 2003 ), falling outside the scope of “real engineering” (Polmear et al, 2018 ) and considered “not very important” or of an “inferior quality” (Lönngren, 2021 ). Thus, what emerges for the purpose of the present analysis is a collective understanding of what it is to be an engineer and educate an engineer as a key generative mechanism for explaining the state and status of engineering ethics education.…”