This symposium includes five papers focused on ethical and transformative pedagogical approaches to empower engineering students to become socially conscious and responsible agents of change in disrupting social injustices.In exploring the social relations and contextual dimensions of learning, ethical and transformative pedagogical approaches delve into community-based learning, liberatory pedagogy, critical consciousness, social responsibility, and equitable education.Our work describes the physical, sociocultural, and relational contexts that allow and empower students to bring their whole selves into engineering learning experiences.The papers describe work in K-16 contexts, illustrating features in the learning environments that allow students to leverage and display their social, linguistic, cultural, and cognitive resources to develop innovative and creative solutions to meaningful engineering problems.We also consider new social relationships in disciplinary practices and the role teachers, faculty and researchers can play in developing novel social configurations to co-create new social possibilities through engineering and engineering design education.