I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment. Love for a design or a field can make it very easy to overlook or ignore the flaws they contain, which can lead to weak designs, perpetuation of bad practices, etc. We need the people who are truly passionate about making the design as good as possible and about strengthening their field and making it work as best as possible, people who will aggressively search for weaknesses in their designs and poor practices in their fields, so they can fix and improve them.

I loved it. I definitely think that your second paragraph nailed the challenge that now faces us: how do we take all these strategies and ideas that we’ve discussed and dissected over the semester and adapt them to fit our particular situations and our particular disciplines? An approach that is very effective for a senior writing class may not be directly transferable to a freshman biology class, but that doesn’t mean the idea behind that approach or the spirit of the strategy can’t translate.

Oddly, I’ve run into somewhat of the opposite problem in Materials Engineering (specifically metallurgy)–we have so much focus on applications that we lose sight of some of the theory. We learn in metallurgy class that this list of elements has effect A on steel, while this other list has effect B. This can be useful in practice, but it’s just as important to know /why/ those elements do what they do, instead of simply memorizing their effects. As with many things in education (and life), there is a balance to be found.

I loved reading your story and seeing how your early teachers helped you to grow into the learner you are today! I feel a bit powerless in my own teaching, since I am getting students who are juniors and seniors in college–by this point, many of them are already burned out and molded into the “ideal” student via standardized testing and uncaring professors, and they just care about doing well enough to pass so they can graduate. Is there something we can do for them or are they too far gone?

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I wholeheartedly agree with this. While I’m super excited for my class next year and how great it’s going to be, I feel like I’m failing my current students. I started out my class this semester with no knowledge of pedagogy and now, even after learning so much from our pedagogy class, I’m somewhat locked in on the trajectory in my class that I set earlier in the semester. They’re learning to use the software and create gating designs, but I know I could serve these students so much better if I could go back and start over, knowing what I now know from this class.

I agree with Amy on your point that a person’s demographic features shouldn’t be considered in engineering design. Be careful not to fall prey to the thinking that engineering is nothing but a technical specialization that solves problems in a vacuum. If the solution to an engineering problem is going to somehow affect people, then a good design will take into account those factors about the people it will affect, in order to tailor it to them precisely. Factors like cost, accessibility, ease of use, etc. all affect who can benefit from a given solution.

Renu,
That Unknowing exercise sounds really interesting! It comes as no surprise that it comes from Eastern philosophy. It also reminds me of the idea of divergent thinking that we saw in class a few weeks ago, imagining additional possibilities for what an object could be or what it could mean.
I also really appreciate you talking about how Tolerance is not enough, precisely because of the definition you quoted. To tolerate is a necessary step, but it is by no means a desirable end result.

Honestly, yeah. That was a big factor in my comfort to talk so openly in this class about my identity and experiences. The fact that she not only had the Safe Zone approval, not only put it on her syllabus, but specifically called it out when she was going over it at the start of class, rather than relegating it to the “other” section of syllabus coverage, signaled to me that she actively engages in these issues and has made a deliberate effort to make that known. That meant a lot to me. If I had professors who did the same in engineering, I would’ve felt much more comfortable and much less panicked about talking to them about a new name and pronouns.

I think that a number of organizations are making decent outreach to women, but that comes from my own perspective, seeing the prevalence of societies such as Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) and the Society for Women Engineers (SWE) [I think that’s the official name, I could be wrong.], as well as the membership and enthusiasm of, at least, Tech’s Alpha Omega Epsilon engineering sorority. I haven’t yet talked to anyone about how they actually feel about them–probably a good idea to do so. As far as racial minorities, I can’t say.

Homero,

I’ve updated the post with a long-ish rant about my experiences with gender and sexuality, if you’d like to read more.