Jon A. Leydens

Where is ‘Community’?: Engineering education and sustainable community development

Sustainable development initiatives are proliferating in the US and Europe as engineering educators seek to provide students with knowledge and skills to design technologies that are environmentally sustainable. Many such initiatives involve students from the ‘North,’ or ‘developed’ world building projects for villages or communities in the ‘South.’ Sustainable development projects in engineering education are being lauded for meeting multiple educational outcomes and providing students with important international training. This paper argues that such programmes need to educate students to think critically about their role as development professionals, to understand and value the role of community in development projects, and to develop long-term assessment criteria for such projects. It argues that engineering educators need to meaningfully engage the ‘community’ in sustainable community development.

Novice and Insider Perspectives on Academic and Workplace Writing: Toward a Continuum of Rhetorical Awareness

Communication researchers have helped frame understandings about disciplinary and professional writing. But often they are outsiders looking in. To complement that research, this study focuses on insider perspectives of engineers in academic and industrial contexts at diverse career stages. Qualitative data are analyzed using phenomenological research methods. Findings indicate that participant perspectives fall along a rhetorical awareness continuum at points spanning from denial and acknowledgment to an accentuation of rhetoric as critical to individual and organizational success. Participant perspectives along the continuum also vary in terms of writer and reader roles, writer identity, career stage/organizational role, and objectivity. Implications for practitioners are discussed.

The Problem of Knowledge in Incorporating Humanitarian Ethics in Engineering Education: Barriers and Opportunities

After both providing a brief overview of historical and connections between engineering practice and humanitarian efforts and noting the qualitative research methodology used, we describe an investigation into the barriers and opportunities in implementing a new initiative in humanitarian engineering ethics (HEE). As the first phase toward HEE implementation, the authors interviewed engineering educators and students to better understand the types of barriers and opportunities implicit and explicit in launching HEE. Study participants reported barriers and opportunities that can be categorized according to the problem of knowledge on three dimensions: the organization, content, and hierarchy of knowledge in current engineering disciplines. These dimensions include the notions that knowledge is and has been organized along disciplinary lines, that the engineering sciences curriculum promotes particularly dominant problem-solving methods, and that some knowledge is valued over other types of knowledge. Study participants also suggested possible opportunities for addressing barriers

Sociotechnical communication in engineering: an exploration and unveiling of common myths

As an area of scholarly interest, engineering communication has begun to come into its own. Its emergence as a dynamic area is not new, but recent efforts have greatly promoted the importance of engineering communication in multiple contexts. Historical accounts accentuate the degree to which the development of engineering communication is linked to technical communication. Indeed, from its inception in the US ‘until the 1950s technical writing and engineering writing were synonymous.’ At different junctures over the past 40 years, US engineering communication has been buffeted by several factors, including

What does professional communication research have to do with social justice? Intersections and sources of resistance

A brief review of literature indicates that professional communication scholars have had a complex, veiled relation with social justice. It is important to better understand the origins of that relation. After briefly contrasting the degree to which social justice has been explicitly integrated in professional communication and three related disciplines, this paper describes potential sources of resistance to incorporating social justice constructs into professional communication research. In professional communication, these sources of resistance are associated with ideologies that circulate within engineering, scientific, and technical contexts: the apolitical myth, ingroup bias, and technical-social dualism. In addition to exploring those three reasons why professional communication researchers generally avoid foregrounding social justice as an explicit component of their research, the paper also considers deviations from that norm by describing the work of pioneers who are integrating social justice in professional communication research. The implications of these pioneers will be discussed.

Integrating Social Justice into Engineering Education from the Margins: Guidelines for Addressing Sources of Faculty Resistance to Social Justice Education

A more socially just engineering profession will necessitate multiple changes to its pipeline—engineering education. If social justice education is to extend across and within the content of the engineering curriculum, it will need to inform and reform multiple educational components: foundational, design and engineering science—as well as humanities and social science—curricula. This chapter identifies common sources of faculty resistance to integrating social justice education in one of those curricular components: humanities and social science pedagogy and content. To facilitate the integration of social justice education in humanities and social science curricula within engineering education, this chapter proposes guidelines that address those sources of resistance. Although initially designed for humanities and social science curricula, the guidelines proposed here have multiple implications for addressing faculty resistance across the entire engineering curriculum. The chapter concludes with an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the guidelines.

Connecting community engagement and social justice: The case of intercultural communication

As engineering students and practicing engineers increasingly engage communities in their work, the need for community engagement knowledge has increased. Regardless of the community engagement context, successful community engagement is tied to the success of any given project. That linkage raises important questions: how do engineers learn to effectively engage communities? A course in Intercultural Communication addresses that question and builds on the underlying foundation of six engineering-for-social-justice criteria: listening contextually; identifying structural conditions; acknowledging political agency/mobilizing power; increasing opportunities and resources; reducing imposed risks and harms; and enhancing human capabilities. Assessment data from this pilot study suggests that as students also learn important intercultural communication concepts, they begin to transform their understanding of community engagement and social justice.

Confronting intercultural awareness issues and a culture of disengagement: An engineering for social justice framework

Multi-university research suggests that despite efforts to foster intercultural awareness among U.S. engineering students involved in community engagement initiatives, such students do not show significant gains—and some show decreases—in intercultural development. Recent research also indicates that even in engineering programs designed to foster public and/or community engagement, U.S. engineering students show evidence of a culture of disengagement. As one approach to address these awareness and engagement gaps, this paper proposes an engineering for social justice framework that, among other factors, promotes identification of underlying root causes of social inequity and enhancement of human capabilities across curricular contexts, including communication courses. Drawing from coded analyses of student papers and evaluations of student discourse, findings from a course in Intercultural Communication suggest the engineering for social justice framework adds value in important ways. Students begin to question and disrupt less agile forms of intercultural awareness, to develop more complex forms of intercultural communication awareness, and to recognize the importance of public/community engagement. Implications for professional communication scholars, engineering curricula, and community engagement initiatives are discussed.

Gear switching: From “technical vs. social” to “sociotechnical” in an introductory control systems course

Practicing engineers regularly impact people and communities through their designs, yet the integration of social and technical factors in engineering education is often lacking or absent. This paper describes the initial integration of social justice into an introductory feedback control class at a public four-year university. We begin with a description of the class and the purpose and scope of social justice integration. Next, we report on our assessment results, focusing on data acquired through assignments, focus groups, and individual interviews with students. Focus group and individual interview data indicate that students “switch gears” between social and technical factors in their technical studies because these two concepts are often treated as separate, unrelated entities. This gear switching can make the integration of social and technical elements more difficult, but also offers opportunities for deeper learning and better preparation for the engineering profession.

Sociotechnical communication in engineering

1. Sociotechnical communication in engineering: an exploration and unveiling of common myths Jon A. Leydens 2. Winds of change: communication and wind power technology development in Denmark and Germany from 1973 to ca. 1985 Kristian H. Nielsen and Matthias Heymann 3. Professional identity on the Web: Engineering blogs and public engagement April Ann Kedrowicz and Katie Rose Sullivan 4. Analyzing the intersections of institutional and discourse identities in engineering work at the local level Marie C. Paretti and Lisa D. McNair 5. Building bridges - identifying generational communication characteristics to facilitate engineering collaboration and knowledge transfer across field-practicing engineers Mary Pilotte and Demetra Evangelou