Teaching Social Justice to Engineering Students

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a novel course called "Science and Engineering for Social Justice" that explores social justice in a science and engineering context, with specific focus on race, gender, sexuality, and disability.We emphasize what students can do to advocate for and represent diverse peoples, and to promote social justice through science and engineering practice.Although applicable to all engineering majors, our work is particularly relevant to educators in biomedical engineering (BME), as the course is focused on several interdisciplinary topics in BME such as universal design, CRISPR genome editing, DNA forensics, sustainable technology, and pharmaceutical and vaccine development.In this paper, our aim is to make teaching about social justice issues more manageable for engineering educators.We provide instructor observations, and analysis of student impact, and full curricular materials including assigned readings, lecture slides, and assignment descriptions online [link blinded for peer review].The curricular materials and insights from this paper are interdisciplinary and transferable to many courses in BME and related fields.In order to make our curriculum more accessible to engineering educators who do not have backgrounds in critical theory (and because we are not experts in these fields ourselves), in this paper we do not provide an extensive background of critical theories on race, gender, sexuality, or disability.However, we do recommend the following resources: Donna Riley's book, Engineering and Social Justice [1], The Center for Critical Race and Digital Theories [2], "Critical Race Theory: An Introduction" [3], and Langdon Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?"[4].As we developed "Science and Engineering for Social Justice," these resources have been particularly helpful: books [see 1, 6, 7], websites [see 8-11], and articles selected for the course (see below). Teaching Social Justice in the Context of EngineeringSocial justice-themed courses are not found in most engineering curricula.As stated by Lord and colleagues in a recent paper describing their efforts to create "Changemaking Engineers" through the Engineering Exchange for Social Justice (ExSJ) at the University of San Diego School of Engineering: "engineering students are trained technically, with less focus on critical examinations of assumptions within engineering practice, and less emphasis on the larger contexts in which engineering is embedded" [5].

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