nce. We recognize this as a unique set of circumstances and realize that others may not be in a similar position
I think you bring up an important point here about privilege. Do you have any plans for expanding or extending this work to institutions that are different than your own?
Reflections on Radical Change
OK, this section addresses some of the questions I posed earlier as I went through the document. It might help to refer to this section earlier. Also this section hints at some of the challenges of the approach you are taking. I'd invite you to explore this topic more deeply either in this paper or a follow-on paper.
Moreover, the activity provides the elements for the students to critique and challenge, or even transform, dominant ideologies in engineering.
I can see this course as providing a counterpoint to the often "rah rah engineering" that is so prevalent in many of the documents that come out of the engineering community. Is any comparison made to the predominant idea that engineering is a force for positive change in the world so that students can develop their own perspectives on ways engineering both helps and hinders social progress and justice? In other words is this presented as a dialectic?
Engineering and Social Justice course
You have talked about the courses, but I am getting a little lost on how these fit into the larger curriculum.
The final course project b
Could you provide some examples of the course projects and how they are implemented? I find myself sort of hanging since the paper introduces the pieces but not how they all come together in the final project.
This realization leads into a discussion of social constructions, and students are eased into concepts such as social identity theory, intersectionality, and privilege.
What are your students' reactions to these ideas given their demographic and economic status? Are there differences between students who come from different cultural backgrounds?
t of articles about different types of technologies, such as an overpass bridge that stops buses from accessing a wealthy neighborhood, a GPS app which unintentionally promotes residential discrimination and segregation, how air conditioning temperature models have excluded women from the workplace, and how facial and voice recognition systems can perpetuate systemic racism and sexism if left unchecked
I assume this are real and not fictional scenarios. Could you provide citations to the articles so others can build on your work?
We developed this course to analyze the world of engineering as portrayed in media, literature, advertisements, and other functional texts
Great idea!
ntly. With the DISJ lens on top of this, the course we offer specifically focuses on users who are often marginalized by society, let alone excluded in engineering (e.g., women, people of color, people with disabilities, people who experience poverty and homelessness, and so
I really like this idea - very powerful.
nt. We saw this requirement as an opportunity to create new courses that integrated these themes directlywithin engineering
What has been the institutional response (and there will likely be multiple ones) to this idea?
Note, I see you address this to some extent later in the paper...
These interventions revealed we were onto something that worked for students. M
There seems to be a big jump here - from what you did to the claim it worked for students. It may be too early or not in your path to collect and present data in the typical way this is done, but could you discuss your students and your own experiences in offering these courses that led to this claim? I feel that there is something empowering here, but as a reader don't share it.
Author DAC also has applied Statics concepts to the socio-political realm. In a one-week module on centroids and center of mass, students learn about gerrymandering in the United States and how the electoral college balances the vote between land mass and population mass [Chen et al., 2019]. Students conduct an analysison their hometown district, practicing concepts of resultant forces, center of mass, and engineering modeling (i.e., making assumptions and simplifications) on a real scenario, to evaluate if their district has been gerrymandered. In this module, studentsuse Statics concepts as a proxy for measuring socio-political disparities and critique the U.S. political system that allows for and encourages decision-makers to skew the distribution of citizen votes for their own benefit. This standalone module is an example of culturally responsive pedagogy, where students are encouraged to challenge the status quo of U.S. politics and investigate whether current socio-political issues might be affecting their own communities.
This is a really cool idea. Would you be willing to cite and share how to access this data so others could adapt your work here?
. These contextualizations within course curricula are an example of culturally sustaining and culturally relevant pedagogy in action.In these cases, author DAC strives to examine student’s practices, such as hobbies, and find ways to sustain them within class.
Are any of these examples drawn from students? Is there a way for students to develop their own problems that are relevant in their own culturet
ne obstacle faced in these attempts was the feeling that there is no space to add anything new into these already packedcourses
Was there a deliberate discussion on what to leave out? Did this involve other faculty and what were the reactions? This may be outside the scope of the paper, but is one of the factors you allude to that inhibits change. If there was push-back how did you process this both intellectually and emotionally?
I am interested in this personally since I have received very strong push-back on trying to make change that was seen as somehow undermining implicit canons of engineering. My experience, as perhaps that of many others, was...traumatic. It was difficult to process that trauma since it occurred in an environment where allies were difficult to find. I would just like to point out that Murmurations is a space to discuss such issues.
shift the incredibly entrenched status quo of engineering education
OK, I think the theory of change is becoming more clear to me. The program seeks to graduate individuals who serve as catalysts for change in their own community by being able both to recognize issues from local cultural perspectives but also have the abstracted knowledge that allows them to act as engineers. So it is a bottom-up and evolutionary model. Is my assumption correct?
2012]. Rather, true decolonization goes beyond surface education reform or actions aimed at freeing the mind. It requires a change of world order and the repatriation of land to sovereign Native tribes
I think this statement highlights a really important tension I hope will be explored later in the manuscript - pedagogies as a method for economic and political change. This statement seems to imply that indigenous pedagogies may not be as effective without widespread systemic change which is a tall order for university faculty. I don't think that is what is being said, but a reader could draw that conclusion. Again as mentioned in the previous comment more discussion of the underlying theory of change would be helpful.
ounter the neoliberal models of school reform
The term "neoliberal" is often overused and can be broadly applied to a wide range of policies and actions in higher education. Providing a reference or explaining which aspects of neoliberalism you seek to address in this effort would be helpful.
We hope this article will serve as a jumping off point for faculty looking for ways to change the system in which we reside.
I am a little lost on why changing pedagogies is a jumping off point for creating systemic change. While I don't necessarily disagree, it might be helpful to unpack your theory of change for the reader. I am using "theory of change" here as shorthand for the thinking you have gone through that connects the means you have chosen to the desired ends you hope to achieve.
cultural competence
Could you better define "cultural competence"? I am reading this as "cross-cultural competencies" since one of the goals of higher education has always been to open student's perspectives to cultures other than their own. Alternatively I could read this as education providing increasing ability to function competently in the student's own culture rather than having to assimilate into the dominant culture.
obe and celebrate rather than annihilate (or assimilat
sentence is a little off.
, 2012]. Using these pedagogies, we hope to change the dominant discourse, improving engineering education for those students already here and making it more welcoming to those who are no
I think I understand what you mean by "dominant discourse" here, but I am not sure. It might help to define this term earlier in the paper so the reader knows what it refers to.
Weagree with these scholars that engineering education has moved further away from confronting its own sociotechnical natur
This phrase "moved further away" makes it sound like engineering education is less aware than it was in the past. I think it is actually more aware of the issues, but perhaps has not make progress on implementing change as quickly as desired.