2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors: Dr. Muhammad H. Zaman and Rana Hussein

More than 115 million people have fled their homes due to war, persecution, and the effects of climate change and other disasters. This number is likely to increase significantly given several ongoing conflicts around the world. Although forced displacement is one of the great global challenges of our time, insufficient attention is paid to this issue within higher education, and it is rarely explored in courses on engineering, basic, and applied sciences. While some models do exist for integrating concepts associated with forced displacement into STEM education, these rarely provide students the opportunity to approach the issue holistically and engage in depth. There is a tendency for such courses to focus only on a select few issues, like those related to water, sanitation, and hygiene, and to do so using siloed approaches, considering the challenges they seek to address in isolation from other inherently related challenges. Limited attention is paid to the causes of forced migration, or the impact of protracted displacement on the quality of life and wellbeing. There is also a tendency to consider narrow definitions of displacement and what it entails without fully considering the limitations of existing frameworks and categories, which might exclude internally displaced people (IDPs) and stateless communities, the range of living conditions beyond typical refugee camps, the fact that forced displacement is a process, rather than a single event, and that various challenges exist throughout the entire journey and not only when a destination is reached. There is therefore a need to incorporate forced displacement into STEM education as more than just an afterthought, recognizing that any examination of the topic requires equipping students with an understanding of the relevant historical, legal, and sociological contexts as well as an ability to think critically and approach issues from interdisciplinary perspectives.

Simply mapping the concept of forced displacement onto existing models is insufficient, as engaging with the issue of forced displacement at any level requires holistic, interdisciplinary thinking. On March 9-10, 2023, the Center on Forced Displacement (CFD) at Boston University and the Committee on Human Rights (CHR) of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine hosted a workshop premised on this idea. The workshop brought together experts in the fields of engineering, human rights, forced displacement, and pedagogy to develop a course that would prepare STEM students to help address challenges associated with forced displacement, several of whom are currently working to pilot versions of these courses at their respective institutions. In this paper, we explore gaps in existing STEM curricula and argue for the need for such a course, describe outcomes of the workshop and outline essential elements of a course which effectively introduces STEM students to this topic, including the necessary historical and political context, moral and ethical frameworks, incorporations of lived experience, and a number of technical and analytical skills, as well as suggested teaching tools, and present our own approaches, through the courses currently being developed, in aiming to create a course that not only instills in students a long-term desire to engage with the issue of forced displacement but also empowers students to tackle similarly complex issues requiring interdisciplinary thinking.

The present paper presents finding from the workshop, the outcome of the discussions, and our pilot course offered at Boston University as a result of this meeting. We will present the scope, the structure, framing, technical content and student response in the course. We will also discuss challenges in content creation, delivery and engagement and directions for the future.