2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Discourses of energy and energy transition have become increasingly prevalent in informal and formal learning spaces. Energy transitions differ across regions, contexts, and technologies. The contextual nature of energy is an opportunity for a sociotechnical approach to its study. Energy transition is not one big change effort but instead is made up of countless decision points negotiated by and through geography, technology, culture, and people. In this study, we examine the different discourses that engineering and liberal arts students engage in as they think about questions in energy transitions. This crossdisciplinary sample of students offers insight into the plurality through which people from different disciplines and backgrounds characterize issues of sustainable energy transition. Through this research, we examined how students think through and characterize issues of energy transition. We situated this study in a cross-disciplinary undergraduate course on sustainable energies, co-taught by two faculty members, one in political science and one in mechanical engineering. The study consists of semi-structured student interviews following the course’s completion. We interviewed ten students across majors and backgrounds on topics of energy transition and their impressions of local and global engagements in the space of sustainable energy.

Through latent coding, we discerned four overarching themes. The first theme consists of students grappling with or recognizing contradictory systems. The second theme, while similar to the first, focuses more explicitly on economics, as students describe the complex entanglements of energy, technology, and free market capitalist paradigms. The third comprises social/technical dualisms in which students discussed energy concepts and contexts through a lens of disciplinary duality in knowledge formations and in reference to their disciplinary identities. Lastly, students’ discourses included paradigms around techno-solutionism, where they reference or complicate the need for more innovation and technology for successful energy transitions. Within these themes, there are nuances in the different logics that underlie student thinking. In this paper, we surface students’ different ideological frames in a sustainable energy course with a predominantly homogenous sample of students. Through this study, we attend to the situated lived and learned experiences of students, which reveal insights into the ways people come to access different positions of learning, questioning, and decision-making in relation to their considerations about the many possibilities that constitute energy transitions. These insights are critical to attend to as the students recognize and hold competing insights around sustainable energy transition much like discourses in real-world energy transitions (Sovacool & Dworkin, 2016).