The education-world dilemma of Education’s autonomy: The case of K-12 engineering education

Abstract

This paper addresses a dilemma of education’s autonomy: if an educational goal is to be universal, how do people’s current problems and concerns are supposed to be integrated or addressed in the educational work, and specifically in teaching the curriculum? The paper looks at this dilemma with a particular educational perspective and within a particular curricular context, namely, how Biesta’s (2022) ideas of grown-up-ness and a middle ground can be employed in K-12 engineering courses. The notion of relative autonomy in education is analyzed and rejected as a way to address the dilemma. Instead, expansive approaches to engineering are reviewed to analyze how their ethical frameworks offer insights about K-12 engineering education that support education’s autonomy. Following Biesta’s work and these frameworks, it is suggested to introduce resistance and raise issues of social power structures in K-12 engineering education, and to shift the attention about engineering from a future occupation in which one needs to be trained to a sphere of human interactions that invites and encourages students to demonstrate grown-up-ness. The paper offers creating situations that “shake” (but not break) the ground beneath the engineering aspirations of the students, and pulling students in and out of what we might call the engineering “zone”; between the world-destruction end of taking the engineering path towards engineering studies and career in any cost and whatever are the difficulties and consequences, and the self-destruction end of regarding engineering as something that is not for me after experiencing it in school. The educational work of the teacher is to push students toward (or encourage to stay in) the in-between area that involves doubts regarding the students’ “existential fitness” to demonstrate human subject-ness. The paper demonstrates the complexity in characterizing education’s relationships with specific social spheres and practices if education’s autonomy is to be maintained.