Critical Consciousness And Engineering Design Teaching Framework

Sustainability in engineering design is not just about the processes and practices established or the materials used and sourced, it is also about the mindset that engineers bring to design to carry forth solutions that promote a sustainable world. In this practice paper, we review a teaching framework for an engineering course on design with a contextual perspective. To contextualize engineering design, we incorporate critical consciousness topics to discuss alongside each design process topic. For example, during the unit when we discuss design alternatives in the engineering design process, we also discuss implicit bias and how implicit bias may impact the alternatives that engineers promote in the design. These critical consciousness topics allow for a dialogue that is rooted in history and an understanding of engineering design outside of a vacuum. An adaptation of this course is being taught at two different higher education institutions in the United States. In this paper, we share this teaching framework along with some examples of how we’re implementing the framework as well as preliminary results from our study of what impact this work has on students’ critical consciousness gains.