CAREER: Liberative Pedagogies in Engineering Education

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Intellectual Merit: Many educators in the humanities and social sciences employ pedagogies based to engage students in creating a democratic classroom that encourages all voices. The goal of this CAREER award is to bring these pedagogies to engineering education and encourage their widespread use in curriculum development as a means to improve the discipline's capacity to successfully attract, retain, educate and advance the broadest possible spectrum of students. Previous work on cognitive approaches to engineering education and on increasing diversity in the engineering profession affirm techniques proposed by liberative pedagogies, which have a three-decade track record of successful implementation in the social sciences and humanities. These philosophies should be applied, tested, and enhanced in a constructive feedback loop in engineering education because they represent good educational practice, because they may advance the engagement of underrepresented groups in engineering, and because they challenge educators to rethink the purposes and goals of engineering education itself. The goals of this Liberative Pedagogies project include: (1) Develop and implement curricular innovations based on liberative pedagogies and student input; (2) Evaluate curricular and pedagogical changes based on liberative pedagogies using both conventional and liberative assessment tools; (3) to understand how women students conceptualize their identities as engineering students and/or future engineers; (4) Disseminate results on campus, in local preK-12 education, and throughout the engineering education community; and (5) Involve students in curricular development based on liberative pedagogies. Broader Impacts: The findings will assist engineering educators nationwide in the shift toward learner-centered education by providing important data about student beliefs and attitudes toward liberative pedagogies in engineering, as well as assessing their implementation in first-year, core, and upper-level elective courses including Engineering Thermodynamics, Mass and Energy Balances, Heat and Mass Transfer, and Engineering and Global Development. The project will develop and test assessment tools and methods based on these pedagogical approaches that will be of service to faculty seeking to adapt their classrooms and curricula to diverse learners.