2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Technological stewardship is a concept used by some engineering educators to exemplify and encourage responsible technological development (Tarnai-Lokhorst, 2019; Caron et al., 2022; Neto et al., 2011). One prominent use of this term is in the Tech Stewardship Practice Program (TSPP), an online course that more than 2000 participants in Canada - largely undergraduate engineering students – have enrolled in since 2021 (Zacharias et al., 2023).

The TSPP positions tech stewardship as “professional identity, orientation, and practice” with the goal of “bend[ing] the arc of technology towards good,” (TSPP, 2023) and differentiates the term from other approaches to responsible technological development. However, understandings of and approaches to technological stewardship are not the same across all contexts. Other programs and scholars present technological stewardship in close relation to concepts like social responsibility, responsible innovation, or macro-ethics, and may use the term to describe either a mindset or a specific set of actions. As technological stewardship makes its way into engineering education vocabulary, it is important for researchers and educators to be clear about its origins, influences, and meaning. In this paper, we address this issue by using a narrative literature review to identify, describe, and analyze the multiple meanings and uses of technological stewardship in different contexts.

First, we look at the complex meanings and varied origins of the term “stewardship” itself. In different contexts such as Christian religious scholarship, environmental governance, forest management, and Indigenous scholarship, stewardship is used in connection with evangelistic missions, forest ecosystems, and managing climate change. Authors position stewardship as everything from paternalistic, hierarchical, and anthropocentric to holistic and ecocentric. Overall, a common theme across all these contexts is the conceptualization of stewardship as ways of caring – however, the actors, motivations, and implications involved in that care vary greatly.

Our subsequent analysis connects different understandings of “technological stewardship” expressed in the literature to the themes expressed in literature on stewardship in other contexts. We identify six dimensions of technological stewardship, based on the categorization developed in the technology policy context by Saner and Wilson (2003): 1) What is being stewarded?; 2) Why is stewardship necessary?; 3) Who is a steward?; 4) Where is stewardship necessary?; 5) When is stewardship necessary?; and 6) How is stewardship enacted?

Through our discussion of how these dimensions of technological stewardship manifest in different contexts, we highlight the contested and political nature of the concept, which is often obscured by its association with “engineers doing good” (Kleine & Lucena, 2021). We argue that understanding the roots and applications of the term in context, including its intended purpose(s) and audience(s), is essential to realizing the potential of technological stewardship approaches.