2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The field of social foundations of education emerged in the early 1930s with the aim of developing a comprehensive understanding of “the cultural phenomena—institutions, processes, practices, beliefs, values, and ways of knowing—that underlie any society’s educational ideas and practices” [1]. By extension, social foundations of engineering—a field that does not yet exist, but should—would seek to understand the institutions, processes, practices, beliefs, values, and ways of knowing that underlie engineering education and practice. The fundamentals of these foundations have emerged in critiques of engineering grounded in several different perspectives including science, technology, and society (STS), engineering ethics, and engineering and social justice. Thus far, however, these perspectives have not coalesced into a coherent intellectual framework. In this paper, we draw parallels between engineering and social foundations of education as the field has evolved over time and argue that social foundations of education provides a promising model for social foundations of engineering. We draw on the literature in philosophy of engineering, STS, and engineering and social justice to identify intellectual traditions and frameworks that can be used to flesh out the conception of social foundations of engineering.