This course sounds really interesting! Thanks for sharing! I think there’s room in every engineering department for a course like that, considering the impact that our work has on human wellbeing, health, and safety.

Yes! Our fields don’t exist in a vacuum. The “pure” approach often overlooks the consequences or the human impacts. In both research and teaching, remembering the “WHY” is so important.

Gary — so true! We definitely need to be mindful of how our empathy is affecting ourselves. Self-care, community, and rest are all important to maintaining a healthy work-life balance and being able to truly be effective in our career.

Agreed! And I don’t think we should stop with just one course — we should weave it into the entire curricula!

Tim, great point. My fiance sent me an article about the Boeing accident and it seems like it was a software problem that came out of a hardware problem. The new engines that they added are larger (because apparently larger engines means more efficiency) but the engines were too close to the ground so they moved them forward. Moving the engines forward then causes excessive lift when a lot of thrust is applied, which can cause the plane to stall. The software was developed to help counteract that effect, but it seems like the effect should have never been allowed into the design in the first place. Great ethical questions here:
1. Is it worth the cost savings to not re-certify the plane and retrain pilots because it’s “just another 737”, even though the design significantly changed? The recertification process is long and expensive — if everything had worked out, we wouldn’t have minded if Boeing had cut corners.
2. How much risk are we willing to take on? Dynamically unstable airframes have been made before, its part of having modern systems that allow us to control for that. What is the balance of designing software to correct for that and just not pushing those boundaries?

Love to hear more thoughts on this.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-the-boeing-737-max-disaster-looks-to-a-software-developer?fbclid=IwAR1Q_oYFuFWFbnDn_OWpM8HQlzpbwOTCrMflWGZNY9ysI48Zeu4Tqe-zKok

Absolutely agree with you here, Cindy! We have to ask students at all levels to grapple with themselves and decide how they’ll respond to an ethical dilemma before it happens. Without that foundation in ethical intent, it’s easy to get swept away by what’s easy or convenient (or cost-effective), even though that decision might have some harmful ramifications.

“Young engineers I will tell you a secret, once you get to design there is no one correct answer there are a ton.” — yes! I agree completely. There may be many answers, but it takes a creative engineer to find the most cost effective, simplest, and most innovative solution and then to present that solution to a client; that’s where the critical thinking and humanities skills come in. The best engineers embrace the humanities, too!

Thanks for your post! Contemporary Pedagogy has also encouraged me to think more about how I might want to create my own classroom once I get to teach. If you taught the same course again, how would you change the way you taught based on what we’ve learned? What would you consider the most important thing to share with the teaching team and to try and get them to implement?

This was a really thoughtful post, and I appreciate you sharing! I wonder if implementing something in our classes where we ask students to “turn to their neighbor and share… *insert whatever thing here*” would help students find friends with similar interests in their own classes. There are some classes where it feels like everything is individualized where maybe the only thing we can ask is just a simple instruction to share something with the person next to us. As an engineer, I think I’ve been lucky to have multiple team-based classes. I hadn’t even considered that other STEM fields might not work the same way. We’ve talked a lot about incorporating problem-based learning and team tasks instead of individual ones. Do you think that if we changed the way we teach a class that students might find it easier to make friends?

Maha’s point about “giving the students a chance and freedom to apply the methods learned in class to their own field” is a great one. We’ve talked about incorporating projects into our syllabi instead of tests for assessment purposes. What do you see as the role of assessment from a critical pedagogy perspective? It seems like the purpose of assessment is to gauge a student’s understanding of the material, whereas critical pedagogy encourages students to look beyond the material. Is it possible to incorporate critical pedagogy practices into our assessments?