2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering educators use the funds of knowledge (FOK) approach to identify and build upon the knowledge that students develop and bring with them from their experiences growing up in particular households and communities. Existing research shows that understanding students in the context of their longer life histories and belongingness in wider communities provides an asset-based approach for enhancing belongingness, especially for students from historically under-represented and historically marginalized backgrounds. This paper takes a different approach by showing how a FOK approach to learning can also open up spaces for students to critique problematic assumptions that are built into dominant engineering epistemologies. It does so by comparing two different efforts to integrate FOK into engineering programs at the same university. The first focused on engineering students enrolled in a humanitarian engineering and science graduate program that encourages sociotechnical thinking and practice. The second used an FOK approach to bring together welding students from a community college and undergraduate metallurgical engineering students to work together on a shared design project. We find that the project helped the engineering students appreciate the FOK of the welding students, laying the groundwork for greater mutual understanding and respect.