Engineering design in the classroom: Is it good science education or is it revolting?

Abstract

The changing emphasis of science education today includes a shift from a narrowly disciplinary view of science to a more socially and technologically situated perspective. This article reports on the implementation of engineering design projects in about two dozen U. S. secondary science classrooms, following an inservice professional development course conducted at a university engineering college. Using data from an evaluation of the project and three sociological themes--secrecy and ownership, social persuasion and the status of facts, and the relationship between money and science--I argue that technological design projects provide a sociologically fruitful approach for teaching new themes in science education. However, teachers must rethink the nature of their subject matter, something that may be difficult if their training was disciplinary in emphasis.The title of this paper is loosely based on Edwin Layton's (1986) book, The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession. Layton's revolution concerns a historical tension between two views of engineering: A view emphasising the important scientific and managerial roles that engineers played in businesses, versus a view emphasising the professional compact between engineers and the public. In the former view, engineers' loyalties were to their companies and their companies' interests. In the latter view, engineers were asked to recognise their obligation to practice with a view to the common, public good, and to concern themselves particularly with the social impacts of technology; their loyalties were supposed to transcend company interests. The "revolt" in Layton's history was a painful shift within the profession from one view of engineering to another.Parallels to this tension exist in the history of the science curriculum. Should the chemistry curriculum, for example, concern itself primarily with chemistry as a structured body of scientific knowledge (the "company loyalty" model, where the "company" is the academic discipline of chemistry) or with the social consequences of the application of chemistry, chemical technologies, or technologies that have chemical impacts on society? Although these two views of science education----disciplinary science versus science applied toward (non-academic) public needs--have had periods of both ascendancy and decline (Bybee & DeBoer, 1994;DeBoer, 1991), for most of the past three decades, notwithstanding efforts like Science for All (UNESCO, 1983) and the Science-Technology-Society movement (Solomon & Aikenhead, 1994), the disciplinary view of science education has largely held sway.Today, the narrow disciplinary view of the science curriculum is undergoing radical revision; ironically, much of this revision appears to have been stimulated by mainstream scientific groups like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, whose Project 2061 publications provided a content blueprint for the new National Science Education Standards (National Research Council...

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