2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

“A culture of disengagement” is what Erin Cech [1, see also 4,9] has named the phenomenon that, within engineering schools, students graduate with less interest in societal issues than when they arrive. Much of this disengagement is attributed to mindsets ([2]: centrality of military and corporate organizations, uncritical acceptance of authority, technical narrowness, positivism and the myth of objectivity) and ideologies ([1]: technical-social dualism, depoliticization, meritocracy) that create a socio-technical divide that encourages many students to marginalize social issues related to engineering. In recent years, some scholars have proposed ways to overcome this disengagement, for example Jon Leydens and Juan Lucena’s (2018) “Engineering for Social Justice Criteria.” However, little research has been conducted to trace how engineering students are taking up these programs.

This paper builds on an NSF-funded ethnographic study of cultural practices in a Science, Technology, and Society (STS) program that serves 1st and 2nd year engineering students [6, 22-23]. That research study sought to answer: How does this program cultivate engineering students' macro-ethical reasoning about science and technology? Radoff and colleagues [6] identified four salient ways that students described the cultural practices of the STS program: 1) cultivating an ethics of care, 2) making the invisible visible, 3) understanding systems from multiple perspectives, and 4) empowering students to develop moral stances as engineers in society (developing a sense of agency). This paper builds off of insights uncovered from Radoff et al by zooming in on the ways students describe how their sense of agency manifests during their time in the program. On top of interview and focus group data, we draw examples from STS student participant observations in STS courses [27]. We use examples drawn from this data to reflect on how encouraging student agency can help overcome the socio-technical divide.