Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2020
Journal Title
Murmurations
Volume Number
2
Issue Number
1
DOI
https://doi.org/10.31946/meee.v2i1.32
Version
Publisher PDF: the final published version of the article, with professional formatting and typesetting
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a CC BY License.
Disciplines
Engineering
Abstract
Point of view: We are a diverse group. Three of us are pre-tenure faculty members in a newly founded Integrated Engineering department that seeks to develop a more holistic and inclusive engineering pedagogy with SML as the only tenured (full) professor. The fifth member of our team, and lead au- thor, joined us in this endeavor while pursuing a Master’s in Peace Studies. BM is a Black male born in Cameroon with a background in the social sciences. GDH is a White male born in the USA who seeks to use this unearned privilege to help change the culture of engineering. DAC is an Asian-American woman born to immigrant parents in the USA, and aims to articulate issues of social justice as a rela- tively privileged person of color through inclusive pedagogical techniques. JAM identifies as Mexican American/Latino, was born in the USA but raised in rural Mexico, and conducts research related to knowledge construction in sociocultural contexts, social justice, and asset-based approaches in en- gineering education. SML is a White woman born in the USA with degrees in engineering who has been in academia for several decades whose scholarly work focuses on engineering education re- search. Working on this team has convinced us of the importance of ensuring that such diversity in engineering teams becomes the norm rather than the exception. Value of submission: The intent of this article is to encourage the engineering education community to look outside of the traditional engineering canon for pedagogical inspiration. We examine a collec- tion of culturally responsive pedagogies and describe both incremental and radical approaches we use to include these in the engineering classroom. Summary: Within engineering, Western, White, masculine, colonial knowledge has historically been privileged over other ways of knowing. Few engineering educators recognize the impact of ethnocen- tricity and masculinity of the engineering curriculum on our students. In this paper we argue for a new approach, one which seeks to create an engineering curriculum that recognizes the great diver- sity of cultural practices that exist in the world. We begin by reviewing key ideas from three pedago- gies not typically incorporated in engineering education: Culturally Relevant/Responsive Pedagogy, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy, and Indigenous Pedagogy. We then present our attempts to develop an engineering curricula informed by these practices. We describe interventions we have tried at two levels: modules within traditional engineering sciences and entirely new courses. We aim to persuade readers that these pedagogies may be a key tool in changing the dominant discourse of engineering education, improving the experience for those students already here, and making it more welcoming to those who are not.
Digital USD Citation
Momo, Bertrand; Hoople, Gordon D.; Chen, Diana A.; Mejia, Joel Alejandro; and Lord, Susan M., "Broadening the Engineering Canon: How Culturally Responsive Pedagogies Can Help Educate the Engineers of the Future" (2020). School of Engineering: Faculty Scholarship. 54.
https://digital.sandiego.edu/engineering_facpub/54