2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Canadian Engineering Education Association-Association / Canadienne de l’Éducation en Génie (CEEA-ACÉG) is a national organization for engineering education practice and research in Canada. Many CEEA-ACÉG members organize into Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to advance their specific interests in engineering education and maintain communities of practice. The Humanities and Engineering SIG is a network of educators, academics, and artists working within or studying the intersections between humanities and engineering.
At the 2022 CEEA-ACÉG annual conference, the Humanities and Engineering SIG facilitated roundtable discussions on four transdisciplinary approaches in engineering education. Over a two-hour period, participants rotated between four tables, focusing on one of the following topics at each table: Sociotechnical thinking, Sociotechnical leadership, STEAM, and Decolonization.
This paper explores the themes that emerged during conference participants’ guided discussions on these four transdisciplinary approaches vis-a-vis a constructivist qualitative content analysis of the facilitators’ notes and transcriptions of the recorded discussions. The relative novelty of these four concepts might have made it difficult for participants to find common definitions, and to discuss their importance to engineering. However, as the discussions within and across tables progressed, participants collectively identified challenges and convergences of these transdisciplinary approaches in engineering education. Based on this analysis of a microcosm of the experiences with transdisciplinary approaches of engineering educators in Canada, we conceptualize this process and these topics as “loose concepts”, and discuss their power for future research and practice