2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With the goal of providing engineering students with a solid grounding in sociotechnical thinking, and an opportunity to explore the complexities of sociotechnical systems, engineering curriculum can draw from a combination of engineering ethics and STS (Science, Technology and Society) studies to offer students a variety of tools for assessing the relationships between technological, social and environmental development. This paper explores a set of teaching practices that combine actor network theory, the concept of affordances, reflexive principlism and care ethics within a foundational course in engineering & society to support the development of sociotechnical thinking.

More specifically, this work refers to teaching practices within a large course in engineering & society studies, offered in the second year to students as a core course in three different engineering programs, and our attempt as instructors to build sociotechnical competencies through an integration of theories and concepts drawing from different disciplinary traditions. The goal of this course is to provide students with dedicated study in the analysis of sociotechnical systems, and a toolbox of approaches and methods for ongoing engagement in sociotechnical thinking and integration in their broader engineering curriculum. The course also offers students opportunities to develop skills in written and oral communication, the facilitation of discussion, and engaging in difficult dialogues. Through lectures, weekly readings, innovative discussion-based seminars and assignments, students are provided with a scaffolded learning approach to gradually build competency in sociotechnical thinking.

By introducing the concept of affordances, students are encouraged to consider the relations that exist between humans and technological artifacts as a starting point for sociotechnical thinking. This is layered within systems thinking and Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005), as the students build a broader understanding of sociotechnical systems as a series of relationships, representing an assembling of social, artifact, environmental and institutional actors. Through this process, we aim to acknowledge and deconstruct the idea of a sociotechnical dualism. After students begin to see technology as a system, and become more aware of its challenges and tensions, we introduce concepts and tools for identifying, describing and eventually mitigating ethical concerns. Broadly, students are introduced to the concept of ethical and moral reasoning, micro and macro ethics, key frameworks in ethics from both the absolute and relative traditions, and the ethical frameworks that garner the greatest focus in the course: reflexive principlism (Beever & Brightman, 2016) and care ethics (Tronto, 1998). Finally, students are introduced to the Design for Social Justice framework (Leydens et al, 2014), giving them an opportunity to consider how the process and outcomes of engineering design can be used to examine and address underlying structural conditions.

While we have found a logic to this layering of approaches to sociotechnical thinking, we also note challenges that students face when using these approaches. For example, systems thinking, and in particular Actor Network Theory, and its view of technologies as ever-shifting, can be challenging for students to wrestle with. As care is often viewed as something we “simply do”, convincing students of its utility as an ethics framework and as an entry point to design for social justice is something that has required creative approaches, starting with personal ethics and moving to the macro. The cognitive and affective requirements of understanding technology as a system and identifying ethical and equity-based concerns at various levels requires significant commitment from the students, despite some conceptual overlap in the relational nature of both lines of thinking.

This paper explores the major components of this curricular approach, examining four key components: Introduction of STS theory and Actor Network theory; Introduction to Ethics and Reflexive Principlism; Care Ethics; and Design for Social Justice. This trajectory of initial exploration is currently positioned in the first four weeks of the course, designed to provide students with a set of tools and approaches to consider and analyze various sociotechnical issues related to sustainability, equity and security throughout the term.