Engineering Education as the Development of Critical Sociotechnical Literacy

Recent policy documents position engineering as a way to broaden participation for students in STEM fields. However, a recent review of the literature on engineering education found that fewer than 1% of reviewed articles focused on issues of equity and broadening participation. For this reason, there are few frameworks to build on when designing for equitable engineering instruction in K-12 settings. Diversifying participation in engineering means that we need to not just bring learners into existing engineering practices, structures, and ways of knowing, but that we take a critical look at the field of engineering education and challenge researchers and educators to create learning opportunities that build on diverse ways of knowing about engineering and being engineers in the world, with a focus on relating course materials to learners’ everyday lives. In this paper, we leverage the diverse histories, epistemologies, and ways of knowing in engineering to outline the possibilities for learners to critically engage with engineering in K-12 settings and we ask the question, “How can we design learning environments to help students critically understand the intrinsic and systemic sociotechnical relationships between people, communities, and the built environment?” To answer this question, we propose an instructional framework for developing learners’ critical sociotechnical literacy, which is a place-based approach for critically engaging learners in understanding the impacts of engineering and technology on their own communities and everyday lives in order to restory these spaces for a more equitable and just future.