Engineering for Whom? Investigating How Engineering Students Develop and Apply Technoskeptical Thinking

Abstract

College engineering education prioritizes technical knowledge and skills, but there is growing recognition that it must also address the social and societal implications of engineering work. Beyond professional ethics, engineers need to develop broader understandings of how engineering and technology interact with and impact individuals and communities. This study focuses on the development of engineering students’ ‘technoskeptical’ ways of thinking, defined as their ability to think about technologies as more than neutral tools and analyze their complex interactions with sociotechnical systems and values. Students in the study were incoming first-year engineering students who participated in a four-week summer bridge program. The program included a course called ‘engineering design for humans and the environment,’ which foregrounded sociotechnical issues and was designed to promote technoskeptical thinking. To assess students’ uptake of technoskepticism, they completed a pre and post task on which they analyzed the unintended effects of outdoor street lighting. Although students engaged in similar technoskeptical inquiries during the design course, this study found that students tended not to transfer those emergent skills to the street lighting task. The results indicate a need to expand instructional efforts so that students more fully internalize technoskeptical practices and apply them to novel situations.

KEYWORDS:

• Engineering education
• engineering ethics
• societal impacts
• technology
• critical thinking

Acknowledgements

I thank all of the ESB participants and staff for their time and contributions to this study. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and Engineering Studies editors for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

This study was approved by the University of Oklahoma Institutional Review Board under study #16001. Informed consent was obtained for all participants in the study. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Karwat, “Engineering for the People”; Leydens, Johnson, and Moskal, “Engineering Student Perceptions”; Zandvoort et al., “Editors’ Overview on Responsibility.”

2 Gupta et al., “Narrative Co-Construction of Stances.”

3 Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology [ABET], Criteria for Accrediting Engineering.

4 Gupta et al., “Narrative Co-Construction of Stances”; Zandvoort et al., “Editors’ Overview on Responsibility.”

5 Herkert, “Teaching Ethical Problem Solving,” 374.

6 Martin, Conlon, and Bowe, “Multi-Level Review of Ethics.”

7 E.g. Bucciarelli, “Ethics and Engineering Education”; Cech, “Culture of Disengagement”; Conlon and Zandvoort, “Broadening Ethics Teaching”; Herkert, “Teaching Ethical Problem Solving”; Leydens and Lucena, Engineering Justice; Riley et al., “Social Justice and Inclusion.”

8 E.g. Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers; Cech, “(Mis)framing of Social Justice”; Riley et al., “Social Justice and Inclusion”; Stevens, Johri, and O’Connor, “Professional Engineering Work”; Trevelyan, Making of an Engineer.

9 E.g. Chen et al., “Institutionalizing Social Justice”; Leydens, Johnson, and Moskal, “Engineering Student Perceptions.”

10 McAlister and Lilly, “Integrating Technical and Social,” 5.

11 Douglas and Attewell, “The Bridge”; Kitchen, Sadler, and Sonnert, “Impact of Summer Bridge.”

12 Bradford et al., “Meta-Analysis of Summer Bridge”; Contreras, “Strengthening the Bridge.”

13 Krutka, Metzger, and Seitz, “Technology Inevitably Involves Trade-Offs,” 228; Pleasants, Krutka, and Nichols, “What Relationships Do We Want,” 489.

14 Banks and Lachney, “Engineered Violence”; Cech, “(Mis)framing of Social Justice”; Leydens, Johnson, and Moskal, “Engineering Student Perceptions”; Riley et al., “Social Justice and Inclusion.”

15 Canney and Bielefeldt, “Framework for Social Responsibility”; Ko, Shim, and Lee, “Views of Social Responsibility.”

16 Chen et al., “Institutionalizing Social Justice”; Leydens and Lucena, Engineering Justice.

17 Chen et al., “The ‘Who’ in Engineering”; Gelles and Lord, “Pedagogical Considerations”; Leydens, Johnson, and Moskal, “Engineering Student Perceptions”; Lord, Przestrzelski, and Reddy, “Teaching Social Responsibility”; Reddy et al., “Introducing Social Relevance.”

18 Cech, “Engineers and Engineeresses”; McGee et al., “Black Engineering Students’ Motivation”; McGee and Bentley, “The Equity Ethic”; Niles et al., “Resisting and Assisting”; Rulifson and Bielefeldt, “Motivations to Leave Engineering”; Seron, Silbey, and Cech, “Persistence in Cultural”; Seymour and Hewson, Talking About Leaving.

19 Leydens, Johnson, and Moskal, “Engineering Student Perceptions”; McAlister and Lilly, “Integrating Technical and Social.”

20 Chen et al., “Institutionalizing Social Justice”; Leydens, Johnson, and Moskal, “Engineering Student Perceptions.”

21 Bielefeldt and Canney, “Changes in Social Responsibility”; Cech, “Culture of Disengagement”; Niles et al., “Resisting and Assisting”; Rulifson and Bielefeldt, “Evolution of Students’ Conceptions”; Slaton, “Meritocracy, Technocracy, Democracy.”

22 Chen et al., “Institutionalizing Social Justice”; Leydens, Johnson, and Moskal, “Engineering Student Perceptions.”

23 Bielefeldt and Canney, “Changes in Social Responsibility”; Gravel and Svihla, “Fostering Heterogeneous Engineering”; Niles et al., “Resisting and Assisting.”

24 Krutka, Metzger, and Seitz, “Technology Inevitably Involves Trade-Offs;” Pleasants, Krutka, and Nichols, “What Relationships Do We Want,” 489.

25 Many of these themes and insights are described more extensively in Pleasants et al., “The Nature of Technology.”

26 Kranzberg, “Kranzberg’s Laws”; Mitcham, Thinking Through Technology; Shepard, “Technological Neutrality.”

27 A concept that is particularly well captured within the Postphenomenology of Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld.

28 Benjamin, Race After Technology; Costanza-Chock, Design Justice; D’Ignazio and Klein, Data Feminism; Eubanks, Automating Inequality.

29 Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, Social Construction; Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience; Verbeek, What Things Do.

30 Huesemann and Huesemann, Technofix; Kolbert, Under a White Sky; Shrader-Frechette, Environmental Justice.

31 Cowan, More Work for Mother; Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience; Kranzberg, “Kranzberg’s Laws.”

32 Banks and Lachney, “Engineered Violence”; Gupta et al., “Narrative Co-Construction of Stances”; Leydens and Lucena, Engineering Justice.

33 Pleasants, Krutka, and Nichols, “What Relationships Do We Want,” 503.

34 Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers; Mitcham, Thinking Through Technology; Stevens, Johri, and O’Connor, “Professional Engineering Work”, Trevelyan, Making of an Engineer.

35 Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch., Social Construction.

36 Bucciarelli, “Ethics and Engineering Education.”

37 This term is described particularly well by Morozov, To Save Everything.

38 Rohde et al., “Design Experiences, Engineering Identity.”

39 Teddlie and Tashakkori, Mixed Methods Research.

40 For a discussion of the identity construct, see Godwin et al., “Identity and Engineering.”

41 This inquiry was inspired by Seaver, Computing Taste.

42 This video was originally published August 16, 2017 on YouTube and can be located at https://www.youtube.com/shorts/87QwWpzVy7I.

43 Buolamwini’s 2016 TED Talk is available at https://www.ted.com/talks/joy_buolamwini_how_i_m_fighting_bias_in_algorithms.

44 This episode of What Next TBD originally aired on July 16, 2023 and is available at https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2023/07/americas-infrastructure-pedestrian-deaths.

45 As described in Governors Highway Traffic Association, Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities.

46 Costanza-Chock, Design Justice; Niles et al., “Resisting and Assisting.”

47 McGee et al., “Black Engineering Students’ Motivation”; McGee and Bentley, “The Equity Ethic”; Seymour and Hewson, Talking About Leaving. This pattern, however, is complex and varies across subfields of engineering, as described by Verdín et al., “Engineering Women’s Attitudes and Goals.”

48 Smith and Lucena, “Invisible Innovators;” Wilson-Lopez and Acosta-Feliz, “Latinx Youths’ Funds of Knowledge.”

49 McAlister and Lilly, “Integrating Technical and Social.”

50 Krutka, Metzger, and Seitz, “Technology Inevitably Involves Trade-Offs,” 244-8.

51 Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, How People Learn, 51-3.

52 Bogard’s The End of Night is a general-audience book that addresses this technology, but students are unlikely to have sought it out.

53 Teddlie and Tashakkori, Mixed Methods Research.

54 Schreier, Qualitative Content Analysis.

55 Ibid.

56 Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña, Qualitative Data Analysis Sourcebook.

57 Schreier, Qualitative Content Analysis.

58 Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña, Qualitative Data Analysis Sourcebook.

59 The dimensions of the Technoskepticism Iceberg provide a “general” conceptual framework. For the specific case of street lighting, my thinking has most significantly been influenced by Paul Bogard’s The End of Night as well as Taylor Stone’s typology of values that he presents in “The Value of Darkness.”

60 For an in-depth discussion, see Taylor Stone, “The Value of Darkness,” especially p. 609–10 and 614-7.

61 Gelles and Lord, “Pedagogical Considerations”; Leydens, Johnson, and Moskal, “Engineering Student Perceptions”; Lord et al., “Teaching Social Responsibility in a Circuits Course.”; McAlister and Lilly, “Integrating Technical and Social.”

62 For discussions of transfer, see Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, How People Learn, 63–65 and Schunk, Learning Theories, 320-323.

63 Chen, Chapman, and Mejia, “Balancing Complex Social Aspects”; Chen et al., “Institutionalizing Social Justice”; Gelles and Lord, “Pedagogical Considerations”; McAlister and Lilly, “Integrating Technical and Social.”

64 Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers; Mitcham, Thinking Through Technology; Stevens, Johri, and O’Connor, “Professional Engineering Work”; Trevelyan, Making of an Engineer.

65 Bielefeldt and Canney, “Changes in Social Responsibility”; Chen et al., “The ‘Who’ in Engineering”; Gravel and Svihla, “Fostering Heterogeneous Engineering”; Niles et al., “Resisting and Assisting.”

66 Chen et al., “Institutionalizing Social Justice”

67 Krutka, Metzger, and Seitz, “Technology Inevitably Involves Trade-Offs,” 244-248.

68 McGee et al., “Black Engineering Students’ Motivation”; McGee and Bentley, “The Equity Ethic”; Seymour and Hewson, Talking About Leaving.

69 Smith and Lucena, “Invisible Innovators;” Wilson-Lopez and Acosta-Feliz, “Latinx Youths’ Funds of Knowledge.”