Abstract
This chapter surveys a range of educational and professional reform efforts in engineering carried out by the Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace network and its members. These efforts are categorized in a way that highlights the diversity of the approaches taken as well as their interconnections. Beyond documenting and categorizing a range of contemporary initiatives in engineering and social justice, the chapter argues that, to be most effective, ESJP members attempt to integrate their particular values orientations and commitments with systematic attention to a wide range of organizational and conceptual problems that inhibit engineering for social justice and peace.
This chapter refines and considerably extends a paper presented at the 2011 Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education in Vancouver, Canada (Nieusma 2011a) and a related presentation at the 2011 annual meeting of Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace in Bogotá, Colombia (Nieusma 2011b).
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- 1.
Donna M. Riley’s Engineering and Social Justice (2008) is noteworthy for its attention to the intersection of engineering and social justice as its primary analytic theme. Other work by members of the Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace network—the topic of this chapter—obviously fits here as well. See, e.g., Caroline Baillie and George Catalano’s Engineering and Society: Working Toward Social Justice, Parts I, II, and III (all 2009a, b, c).
- 2.
A session at the 2011 Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education was dedicated to critically analyzing the approaches and underlying assumptions represented in the NAE’s (2008) Grand Challenges of Engineering report (see Catalano 2011; Herkert 2011; Nieusma and Tang 2011; Riley 2011; Slaton 2011).
- 3.
This work draws on the emerging framework of threshold concepts originated by Erik Meyer and Ray Land (2003).
- 4.
See for example the multi-institutional collaboration, “Engineering Learning through Service” (sites.tufts.edu/efeltsworkshops/) and the open-source International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering, first published in 2006 (library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/ijsle).
- 5.
See http://wasteforlife.org/?page_id=2, accessed 22 April 2012.
- 6.
See http://wasteforlife.org/?page_id=2, accessed 22 April 2012.
- 7.
For reference, a typical US engineering program entails roughly 130 total required credit hours of coursework, with roughly 24 of those credit hours historically dedicated to H&SS content.
- 8.
- 9.
In fact, all three of the aforementioned grants have garnered considerable interest in the research community, with requests for sharing proposals and derivative projects being framed, in some cases with grant recipients serving as advisors on those derivative projects.
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Acknowledgements
I acknowledge and thank my colleagues in the Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace community for their inspiration, collaboration, and support over many years. In particular, I wish to thank Caroline Baillie, Chris Byrne, George Catalano, Katy Haralampides, Jens Kabo, Jon Leydens, Juan Lucena, Usman Mushtaq, Donna M. Riley, Jen Schneider, and Andrés Valderrama Pineda for their contributions to my thinking about social justice and my understandings of ESJP as a community as well as for producing or co-producing most of the work this chapter draws on. I would also like to thank Jens Kabo, Jon Leydens, Juan Lucena, Donna M. Riley, and an anonymous reviewer for detailed feedback—at various stages—on the arguments presented here.
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Nieusma, D. (2013). Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace: Strategies for Educational and Professional Reform. In: Lucena, J. (eds) Engineering Education for Social Justice. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6350-0_2
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