2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineers play a vital role in delivering mitigatory effects to wicked problems. However, conventional engineering education relies overwhelmingly on well-structured problems and design challenges and does not prepare students to adequately address wicked problems. Not only are wicked problems daunting and difficult for engineering students, tackling such problems requires unconventional approaches such as an awareness of positionality and sustained empathy in engineering design. While the engineering design process contains the concept of empathy, it is not always explicitly, consistently, and intentionally emphasized.

Drawing on scholarship from the philosophy of empathy and engineering education, we employed a care and virtue ethics based approach to explicit and intentional empathy instruction in our first-year engineering design curriculum. The curriculum charges students to address wicked problems such as the challenges and inequities faced by people with disabilities. We modified our first-year engineering design thinking course to include activities that encourage students to think of empathy as a skill, a site of learning, and an attitude via engagement with two kinds of empathy: self-oriented and other-oriented. Self-oriented empathy activities promote empathy as a competence that is learned through listening, naming nonverbal cues, and perspective taking. Other-oriented empathy activities enable students to identify and expand their socio-cultural awareness, and grapple with and disrupt biases. More specifically, to encourage consistent, active learning around empathy at different stages of the design process, we created assignments that ask students to reflect on their positionality when tasked with self-oriented and other-oriented empathy exercises. These metacognitive exercises encourage students to recognize the impact of their design choices beyond their own lived experiences.

In the first phase of our research, we used multi-method approaches to capture students’ positionality and measure the impact of positionality awareness on shifts in empathetic tendencies. This work-in-progress paper focuses on the initial results from this exploratory phase. They highlight a limited positionality and showed several consistent themes around students’ empathetic practices based on perceptions and attitude towards the role and importance of empathy throughout the design process.