2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this paper, the four authors consider our roles as engineering educators teaching courses that emphasize engineering practice as a sociotechnical endeavor (Neeley, et. al, 2019; Reddy et. al, 2023). Situated in different institutions and schools, we reflect on commonalities and differences in our approaches to sociotechnical education, particularly incorporating scholarship that illuminates the complex relationship between science, technology and society into engineering and humanities courses. We draw heavily from disciplines such as science and technology studies, engineering studies, and the history of science and technology, among others (Johnson et. al, 2022; Kline, 2001). We also reflect on how our varied institutional homes have influenced how we approach sociotechnical education in the classroom (Nieusma, 2015). For example, we examine approaches to engage technically-minded students to consider sociotechnical skills as central to their engineering education. This holds for broad engineering ethics courses as well as ethics modules embedded within core technical courses. Courses that explore engineering culture by integrating ethics and history encourage students, many of whom are interested in using teamwork to solve problems, to think how they might improve upon past collaborations if equipped with hindsight. We also discuss classroom experience with students who are technically-minded (or expertise-minded) but have their home in Colleges of Arts and Science and major in pre-med, pre-law, or pre-business fields such as biology, computer science, economics, or political science. We reflect on how the pedagogical choices we make among the four authors, which we have documented here, are part of an ongoing conversation among us as scholars of science and technology studies and engineering education and between us and the students. We argue that our individual and institutional contexts deeply influence our pedagogical choices. Parts of our experiences transcend our institutional contexts, while other do not scale or travel. Some components are unique to our situations and positionalities, while there are others that are applicable elsewhere. We recognize that our students bring their own choices and expectations into the classroom; that the classroom is a space in which they encounter our choices and those of their peers; and that through this process we hope to inform students how to make their own choices regarding social and technological change.