Bringing Social Justice Context into Civil Engineering Courses for First-Year and Third-Year Students

Abstract

Civil engineering education must be updated to keep pace with the profession and move past a culture of disengagement where technical work is considered separate from societal impact. Civil engineering students need to engage with diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) so they can understand the differential impacts of engineering on individuals from different groups within society. We aim to encourage the transformation of civil engineering education to produce engineers who will be prepared to meaningfully engage with society and advance justice in their future professional roles by providing examples of pedagogical change and analyzing student responses. In this study, we implemented new course assignments in an introductory civil engineering course and a Civil Engineering Materials course. In the introductory assignment, students were taught to draw systems models and asked to consider social and technical factors contributing to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. In the materials course, students completed preclass readings about a regional highway reconstruction project, including articles about neighborhood opposition to the project, and participated in an in-class discussion. We analyzed student submissions using qualitative content analysis. Students in both courses (33% introductory, 60% materials) described learning about the impact engineering designs had on the community. In the materials class, students were asked specifically about the impact of race and wealth on infrastructure decision making. Student responses showed a wide range in how students understood the history of the situation and dynamics of power and privilege. Errors and limitations in student responses point to specific ways the instructors can improve student learning. Our results demonstrate that the integration of activities about societal impact is possible in technical engineering courses, emphasize the importance of integrating social context and related DEIJ content into technical courses, and provide insights into what students perceived they learned from the activities. This article provides two examples of how engineering educators can incorporate the social context of engineering into their required technical courses. One example uses Hurricane Katrina to help students learn about system models that include social systems as integral parts and the other example uses a regional highway reconstruction project as a way to consider the Envision sustainability rating system. Analysis of student responses to these activities showed that students learned about the impact of social context on engineering work, and this information seemed novel to many students. Students were willing to engage with questions specifically about race and socioeconomic status, but their responses showed that they needed more historical background to understand how unjust conditions came to exist. Ultimately, changes to individual courses such as those described here will have limited impact on students, and civil engineering departments and majors need to reconsider the curriculum more holistically.