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

Abstract

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.

A Place-Based Sustainability Approach to Learning about Photovoltaic Solar Energy

“…We were encouraged to see the students reflect on needing more depth in their social and environmental analyses and find it suggestive of an advanced integration of the sociotechnical engineering mindset we had hoped to nurture in the students: a valuing of the "socio". This contrasts with our findings in previous work with students earlier in the curriculum, in which students focused on the technical and economic rather than the social or environmental [9,47,54].…”

“…Several students commented on the sociotechnical nature of the course and their experiences with the engineering design process and three pillars of sustainability through the project. In a previous study [54], we heard students grasping for the words to describe sociotechnical engineering by describing what it is not (e.g., "not just technical"), or describing it as "more than" technical. We found echoes of that sentiment in this study.…”

The “Who” in Engineering: Sociotechnical Engineering as Memorable and Relevant

“…; and What differentiates engineers versus non-engineers? [11], [12]. The interview moved into investigating why the students chose Integrated Engineering as their major and continued with questions about the energy course, such as the most and least interesting things about or from the class, and how the class compared to other engineering courses at the university.…”

“…The second activity question included an online hands-on card-sorting activity, during which participants were asked to sort images from the class on a spectrum from least to most memorable. This paper focuses on the results from this card-sorting activity, whereas results from the rest of the interviews are published separately [10], [11].…”

Work in Progress: Student Reflections from a Semester-Long Place-Based Photovoltaic Solar Energy Project

“…This approach is consistent with the overall goals of the integrated engineering department at the University of San Diego which aims to help students see engineering as a sociotechnical endeavor. More details about courses in this curriculum are available in additional publications [13][14][15][16][17], including a deeper discussion about this specific course [18].…”