2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Formal education is venerated as a tool for an educated citizenry and upward social mobility. American universities have proffered education, engineering skills like problem-solving and critical thinking, and specifically engineering education (EE), as a tool for social mobility or individual agency within and outside the U.S. However, imposing curricula and pedagogy developed in American universities reinforces structures of marginalization in engineering and EE. Such curricula and pedagogies often promote hegemonic ways of knowing, doing and being in engineering.

Partnering with organizations that support the leadership of marginalized and displaced students in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Senegal, and the U.S., we critically question our role as EE researchers in the U.S. and reflect on our complicity in reinforcing structures of marginalization in EE. Through reflections, ongoing implementation, and discussions with practitioners, we have observed how a curriculum is socially constructed and reproduces the values of those with power.

Curriculum design requires a multi-dimensional approach to resist dominant ways of knowing, doing, and being in engineering. A localized and holistic curriculum requires more than simply adding context-specific examples. Instead, we see the curriculum as a puzzle. The challenge is to design a puzzle - a curriculum - in which, using the same pieces, learners can assemble different final pictures. While this may be impossible for a physical jigsaw puzzle, that is what a curriculum should do: use similar inputs to help learners get a range of outputs.

With this critical and multi-dimensional approach, the Localized Engineering in Displacement curriculum has evolved over the past seven years. In this paper, we focus on five recent developments: 1) EngStarter - a toolkit for tinkering and prototyping with electronic components, 2) a design notebook for students, 3) spatial visualization assessments, 4) a teacher guide and 5) co-design workshops to localize with teachers. We explore the drivers of relevant curricular design and share lessons from developing this curriculum.

We describe the curriculum design process, including detail of the five components and their interrelations. Additionally, we share illustrative examples to highlight how our reflections and reflexivity shaped the iterations of various curriculum components. Our paper is relevant for engineering educators and EE researchers who want to (re)design their curriculum and make it relevant to their students. It is also helpful for practitioners who strive to ensure that dominant curricula do not reinforce the exclusion of marginalized students. Our takeaways are that teachers and students are the most critical parts of curriculum design, they require a balance between flexibility and structure for a relevant learning experience, and that hegemonic ideas can be woven through the curriculum despite best efforts to be critical. Most importantly, we find that the more we localize, the more there is to localize; therefore, we need to split the puzzle into even smaller pieces.