Virtual Conference
July 26, 2021
July 26, 2021
July 19, 2022
TELPhE Division Technical Session 2: The Broadening Face of Engineering Education
Technological and Engineering Literacy/Philosophy of Engineering
Diversity
14
10.18260/1-2--37416
https://peer.asee.org/37416
479
Angela Bielefeldt is a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering (CEAE) and Director for the Engineering Plus program. She has served as the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education in the CEAE Department, as well as the ABET assessment coordinator. Professor Bielefeldt was also the faculty director of the Sustainable By Design Residential Academic Program, a living-learning community where students learned about and practice sustainability. Bielefeldt is also a licensed P.E. Professor Bielefeldt's research interests in engineering education include service-learning, sustainable engineering, social responsibility, ethics, and diversity.
In light of the disruptions in higher education brought about by COVID responses, faculty were encouraged to be more accommodating of student issues. These edicts largely could be construed as showing kindness. But why should faculty kindness toward students only be manifested in the face of a global pandemic? Even before the pandemic there was a growing mental health crisis in higher education, just one driver of many to spur faculty to treat students with kindness. This paper explores issues of kindness in engineering and engineering education. What evidence is there that kindness is congruent or incongruent with engineering education? What is the value of considering kindness in comparison to the constructs of care, empathy, and compassion? The perspectives of a variety of scholars are synthesized in this analysis. This is followed by concrete examples of teaching and course practices that are emblematic of kindness, such as compassionate pedagogy. The author argues that kindness is appropriate to embody within engineering education, irrespective of externally obvious stressors like a global pandemic.
Bielefeldt, A. R. (2021, July), Kindness in Engineering Education Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--37416
ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2021 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015