2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Scholarship on sociotechnical integration highlights pedagogical strategies for creating connections between technical subjects and their relevant social, cultural, and political contexts. This paper takes up a related question, that of context, and its meaning and function in engineering education. We focus on the process of developing contextual thinking skills among undergraduate students in the engineering classroom.

Drawing on our perspectives as historians of science and technology, and reflecting our teaching practices in schools of engineering and colleges of arts and sciences, we offer three strategies for introducing students to contexts and contextual thinking. The first strategy includes scaffolding student engagement with material culture of the past through: (a) close collaborations with college archives and special collections that provide students with a hands-on experience with asking questions of physical artifacts that reflect technical knowledge, such as sixteenth century texts on mechanics; and (b) assessments that guide students through the practice of “sleuthing” for context, or doing historical research to ask questions about the time, place, and experience of, for instance, topographic engineers during the U.S. Civil War.

A second strategy asks students to sharpen their understanding of engineering work as opposed to the context of engineering work through: (a) a course unit on the founding of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in post-Independence India, as seen through primary sources that reveal the role of engineering in building a new post-colonial state in 1947, pondering how this is (in students’ own language) a “political” or “governmental” context of engineering work; and (2) a course unit on the relationship between engineering work and the artistic rendering of engineering work, for example in pop culture and in films such as “War Games” (1983).

Our third strategy introduces students to the fields of history of technology, engineering studies, and engineering ethics within a single course. These literatures support the development of contextual reasoning by offering complementary perspectives: history of technology emphasizes temporal and institutional contexts; engineering studies identifies patterns in professional practice, such as boundary spanning; and engineering ethics highlights responsibility and judgment in specific situations. By developing these perspectives and applying them to their own emerging careers, students come to see themselves as situated actors whose decisions and opportunities depend on context.
Taken together, these course units help us engage, together with our students, the role that contexts and contextual thinking play in sociotechnical case studies and sociotechnical programs of study.