Engineering, Technology and Culture: with an Emphasis on Race, Gender and the Individual

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The aim of this project is to make the social sciences and humanities more meaningful to engineering students, including women and underrepresented minorities. It is an effort to reform undergraduate engineering education by offering a unique interdisciplinary and multi-cultural diversity engineering course as part of the general education curriculum. The course, entitled "Technology and Culture", places specific engineering designs within the social and political context of race, gender and individuals. The course is designed to give technical students a better understanding of the cultural, historical and political context of their disciplines. At the same time it gives humanities and social science students a better understanding of the methods and capabilities of science and engineering. The project promotes new interdisciplinary teaching methods and encourages faculty to experiment with different ways of incorporating multi-cultural diversity and gender issues into their courses. It enlists the cooperation of faculty, departments and committees across the colleges of engineering and the liberal arts and sciences. It reinforces this cooperation through a series of faculty development workshops emphasizing cultural sensitivity training and interdisciplinary teaching methods. The project also serves as a catalyst for reform for the teaching of other courses that integrate engineering and science with disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences.