2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering education holds a profound potential to promote youth’s understanding and engagement in environmental sustainability, social justice, and decision-making in an AI-enabled future. However, the traditional approach to defining engineering that has guided engineering practices is insufficient because it fails to embrace these realities. Therefore, the need for a new framework that reflects these realities is overwhelming. This paper introduces a new theoretical framework called socially transformative engineering that not only captures these missing elements but also values and incorporates the diverse perspectives and experiences of students. In particular, this framework draws upon the legitimation code theory and justice-centered pedagogies and builds on three tenets (reasoning fluency, multicultural ingenuity, and ethical integrity). Further, this framework argues that conscientious negotiation of risks and benefits for the betterment and transformation of societies is underpinned by four reasoning quadrants (experiential reasoning, trade-offs reasoning, first-principles reasoning, and future reasoning), fluently examined through the core practice of multicultural ingenuity and ethical integrity. This paper details the theoretical foundations of the socially transformative framework and provides examples of its pedagogical translations to guide pedagogy practices.