Engineering for Social Good? How Professional and Educational Experiences Inform Engineers' Solutions to Complex Problems

Abstract

There have been a number of high-level calls for increased attention to contextual aspects of engineering work (including social, cultural, political, economic, environmental, and temporal considerations) as essential for ensuring the field can adequately address the complex problems of the modern world. However, the field of engineering – long grounded in a positivist tradition based on the primacy of technical considerations – has been slow to change. This qualitative study provided insight into how a persistent underemphasis on social and contextual aspects of engineering work in educational and professional settings is perpetuated, and how this underemphasis shapes the experiences of engineering undergraduate and graduate students and practitioners. Specifically, this study explored the aspects of engineering work emphasized in various local settings and the ways these informed engineers’ day-to-day practice as a potential mechanism that explains how a narrowly technical model of engineering work that largely neglects contextual considerations of engineering problems, is reproduced. In addition, the study highlighted how the aspects of engineering practice emphasized in study participants’ educational and professional settings (mis)aligned with their personal values and explored the implications of this misalignment for how these engineers viewed the field and their place within it. The study involved a two-phase design. Phase 1 was comprised of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 46 engineering students and professionals from a range of academic and personal backgrounds about their experiences in solving a complex engineering problem, included the types of factors participants attended to in solving these problems. Phase 2 included follow-up interviews with a subset of 18 participants. The second phase used a card-sort task to identify the practices participants perceived to be most and least valued in the educational and professional contexts in which they had engaged and interview questions to elicit the ways in which these emphases did and did not align with their personal values and priorities. Analyses leveraged social practice theory (from the work of Dorothy Holland, Jean Lave, and colleagues) to explore the ways meaning and practice are negotiated within local cultures and the implications for how people and their actions are recognized and rewarded within those contexts. Findings from this study highlight the following: 1) the extent to which day-to-day engineering education and work overlooked social and contextual considerations, despite these being stated institutional and national priorities in engineering and priorities of many students and practitioners in the study; 2) how the neglect of contextual aspects of engineering training and work contexts was reproduced in the practice of these engineers when solving a complex problem; and 3) how the practices emphasized within engineering contexts varyingly aligned with participants’ own values and the consequences of this (mis)alignment for their sense of their fit in the field. These findings have implications for both the ability of engineers to understand and meet the needs of a complex global society as well as for the field’s ability to attract and retain a diverse engineering workforce. Specific recommendations based on this study’s findings include the importance of integrating contextual considerations throughout the core engineering curriculum and providing faculty and instructors the training and resources necessary to do so.

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