2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As a transformative educational tool, critical consciousness is essential for fostering equity and addressing systemic inequities in academic disciplines. Within engineering education, where rigid technical frameworks often marginalize alternative epistemologies, fostering critical consciousness provides a pathway to move toward decolonization. However, research on how to shift entrenched colonized mindsets toward more inclusive and decolonized perspectives remains limited. This challenge is particularly pronounced for engineering students, who encounter few opportunities to engage with decolonized ideas and practices during their undergraduate studies. This study investigates the potential for fostering such transformations through a presentation of geophysical data characterized by inherent ambiguity and situated in a culturally charged sociotechnical context: the use of geophysical tools to detect unmarked graves at a former Indian Residential School. By interrogating the ambiguities inherent in geophysical data collection, this research unravels the mechanisms of engineering practice, challenging boundaries that marginalize diverse viewpoints and integrating multiple perspectives to recognize alternative "valid truths" as valuable contributions to knowledge. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study evaluates undergraduate students' perceptions of colonized and decolonized constructs through anonymized pre- and post-presentation questionnaires. Pedagogical objectives focused on enhancing sociotechnical thinking by encouraging students to embrace technical data ambiguity, critically engage with marginalizing ideologies, and consider diverse epistemologies as part of engineering practice. Our research seeks to address the question: How do engineering students perceive and respond to the integration of diverse ways of knowing and cultural knowledge systems, and to what extent do they recognize these approaches as valid and valuable contributions to engineering education? Quantitative data from Likert-scale questionnaires revealed notable shifts in student perceptions, particularly in three areas: identity, objectivity, and the inclusion of alternative knowledge systems. Qualitative survey data supported these findings, highlighting themes such as epistemic humility, the integration of Indigenous perspectives, and the challenges of confronting traditional engineering paradigms. Results suggest that fostering critical consciousness can enable incremental shifts in students’ capacity for decolonized thinking. This study underscores the evolving nature of engineering education, emphasizing the necessity of recognizing diverse perspectives and addressing the marginalizing structures within engineering practices. By integrating sociotechnical complexities into curricula, educators can cultivate critical consciousness and empower students to approach engineering with greater empathy, ethical awareness, and inclusivity.