I appreciate your thoughts and experiences in making educators more human and “undivided” as Palmer states. When teachers aren’t able to express their values and opinions it equates us to machines; if we want our students to develop authentic voices we need to model that behavior as well.

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So I completely understand when you say you value the pedagogy that strives for “better engineers” and as a result perhaps better engineering education with an eye on the humanities. This means renovating the curriculum and adopting critical pedagogy. On the other hand, I still think enlightenment, building character, and even fulfilling personal interests CAN and maybe should be taken as seriously as objectives by engineering students.

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I am glad that we can all find educators like the fantastic Mr.S. I would think all of us in this class strive to be a teacher like this. I really like the tidbits you share here about your adviser and I think extending a little bit of our humanity/ a glimpse into your softer side really helps to let your students connect with you. Thanks for sharing.

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Thanks Gary! I feel that too often we have gotten into a place of complacency, at least for myself, this was the case. I was in this fog of inaction for a long time with my previous academic position. I slowly, but surely, let my values and beliefs be stripped from me and this semester, especially this course, has helped me feel like I’m getting my voice back.

Maha,

I absolutely agree with you. As an engineering student this class opened my eyes up to a lot of concepts that I would consider foreign/ did not typically think about. I am really glad that as a class we got to collaborate on topics like diversity, inclusion, learner-centered, technology. I think it will all help us bring some modern thinking to an age old profession.

Hi Maha! Thanks for the post and your self-reflection on critical pedagogy overall. As you know, this semester I am teaching for the first time too and wished to take our class before any teaching experience. This class does not only provide how to “start” adopting critical pedagogy in terms of PBL, creating inclusive class, how to assess but also to understand how we, both as educators and students, learn effectively. That’s why I also appreciate our class and glad that it made me make self-reflection as well. Once again, thanks for sharing your thoughts on our class:)

Hi Meredith,
Thanks for your post. Really interesting observations on the need for empathy. I whole-heartedly agree with your thoughts on the need for empathy, because it is a very human expression that we are often taught to suppress. The other side of that is that high-levels of empathy are exhausting for many people. If we really engage in empathy in our work (which we should) we are going to limit the outcome we can produce as workers (and that should be OK). This means that we need to have strong supports in place to take care of ourselves. We don’t do that well. We are more isolated relationally than at any point in history. We work ridiculous hours for the purpose of “keeping up with the Joneses.” We need to realign the way we function in order to maintain empathy. Self-care allows us to care for others. Thanks for the great post,
Gary

I say speak up now. My program got fed up with how disconnected we were for an interdisciplinary degree and made our own student council to get students in different corners of the program talking to one another. We have chemists, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, physicists, and others that as students have come together to tell our instructors/directors (we don’t have an actual department and therefore no department head…it’s a headache) that we needed change. From this, we’ve learned that they also have frustrations with the current implementation of our programs and they are willing to switch things up. Currently, I’ve added one course to our list of allowed electives, and am using the syllabus/PBL from this course to rebuild a two-semester intro class that all the grad students have to take. I’ve talked with our degree program head, and he is supportive whenever I talk to him about it.

If you think a course would benefit from a change, try redesigning it and talking to those in charge. You might be surprised at how receptive they are.

You bring up a good point in that simple and repetitive tasks are necessary for many professions. But you also point out that the more we train towards these tasks, the more we expect living, breathing, dreaming human beings to behave as robots. This is neither healthy nor wise. The fact of the matter is that our current system is set up such that we put profit over human lives. A worker can drive a robot and such remotely. This is still a job that requires similar repetitive tasks but doesn’t risk the worker’s life to black lung, mine collapse, and other things. However, the cost of that worker’s life is still cheaper to the company than to replace him with an actual robot. That’s messed up in my view.

Anyway, back to education, I think workers should at least be able to fully understand why they are doing the actions they are. Why is that golden rule the safest way they can do things? People will remember safety rules better if they have context for its application and know why a rule was put in place. I think there is probably a spectrum for how critically people need to think for any given job, but currently, we need a lot more of the critical thinking to help prevent the giant ethical case studies we keep seeing pop up (Tesla, Volvo, Boeing, any HydroFracking company, BP’s many oil spills, etc)

Thanks Gary. Taking care of those social and emotional needs often need to come before the academics. It seems like more and more kids are experiencing trauma and need extra TLC.