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Scaffolding Social Justice in the Engineering Classroom: Constructing a More Restorative, Inclusive, Engineering Practice

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Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

Social Justice and the Curriculum: Equity, Culture & Social Justice in Education Division Technical Session 3

Page Count

24

DOI

10.18260/1-2--41866

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/41866

Download Count

807

Paper Authors

biography

Sydney Turner University of Virginia

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Sydney Turner is a Doctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia in the Department of Engineering Systems and Environment. With her research focused on the intersection of access to safe drinking water and the reduction of mosquito-borne diseases, she finds herself drawn to multi-faceted public health solutions that build empowerment and resilience in underserved and historically marginalized communities utilizing inclusive and universal design principles. Ultimately, her work aims to build bridges between those designing and those being designed for.

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biography

Bethany Gordon University of Virginia

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Bethany Gordon is an incoming assistant professor at the University of Washington (Fall 2022). Her research is focused on applications of behavioral science to improve the design of the built environment to improve equity. Her research also focuses on climate justice and addressing designer positionality (i.e., framing assumptions, stakeholder perspective-taking) in large-scale infrastructure design. She earned her PhD (2022) and her BS (2017) in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Virginia. She is also an NSF Graduate Research Fellow (GRFP), UVA SEAS Dean's Scholar, and a GAANN teaching fellow.

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Tomeka Carroll

biography

Katelyn Stenger University of Virginia

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My goal is to understand and design for complexity by partnering with designers, policymakers, engineers, and scientists. Currently, I research ways to better design for behavior as systems change in my role as a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia. I also serve as an Associate Program Officer with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where I contribute to envisioning the 21st Century Data Infrastructure with the Committee on National Statistics. I have eight years of experience designing, engineering, and researching in a range of contexts. Before my PhD experience, I founded and led the social justice start-up, PHL Droplet, which used American Community Survey data and Philadelphia housing data to identify homes at risk for lead piping. This led to a policy proposal for lead-free water in homes renovated by the city. I have also engineered building facades for the Hudson Yards Project – the largest US real-estate development in the past century, developed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models for gas turbines, and prototyped brain surgery devices. In short, I enjoy solving for complexity by partnering with smart people who bring different ways of knowing to the table- whether from lived experience or learned expertise.

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Patrick Hancock University of Virginia

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Patrick I. Hancock is a Doctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia in the Department of Engineering Systems and Environment (ESE). His research focuses on developing collaborative engineering practices that facilitate processes and generate outcomes that meet community definitions of social justice. Patrick’s work has appeared in Nature Sustainability, American Psychologist and iScience.

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Abstract

Within a core undergraduate civil engineering course, students engaged with an online learning module and participated in an in-class workshop that emphasized the intersection of social justice and the construction design process. The results presented in this paper analyze how engineering undergraduate students felt about interacting with engineering concepts contextualized through a social justice perspective. Students who participated in the study took both a pre and post survey, which allowed for comparative data on the student’s preconceptions of social justice as well as if the intervention improved their perceptions of the importance of social justice in engineering. The results show, even before the intervention, students perceived value in engineering social justice issues. That said, engaging in the intervention still had significant impacts on students’ perceptions of social justice. After their experience with the online module and in-class discussion, students were significantly more likely to: think they will encounter social justice issues; have an opportunity to address social justice issues; see social justice as relevant to engineering; and feel they knew more about social justice than before the module. The results from this work supports other findings in the engineering education literature that suggests students are interested in and benefit from contextualizing the societal implications of engineering work throughout their engineering education. The student feedback presented in this paper contributes important insights on the development of future modules and workshops on engineering and social justice.

Turner, S., & Gordon, B., & Carroll, T., & Stenger, K., & Hancock, P. (2022, August), Scaffolding Social Justice in the Engineering Classroom: Constructing a More Restorative, Inclusive, Engineering Practice Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41866

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