Retooling Engineering for Social Justice: The use of explicit models for analytical thinking, critical reflection, and peer-review in Swedish engineering education

Katarina Larsen,Johan Gärdebo

doi:10.24908/ijesjp.v5i1.8928

Abstract

This paper engages with social justice in engineering education based on pedagogical tools aimed at improving analytical reading, writing and critical reflection in course activities. The authors conceptualizes analytical thinking, critical reflection, and web-based peer review as tools for transformation of student learning, and apply these tools as instructions to engineering students studying city planning in Stockholm, Sweden. Students were asked to use the tools to critically analyze the role of national identities, social vis-à-vis technological engineering, and what politics have shaped Swedish society. In studying these aspects of city planning, the authors argue for a shift in attention toward the practices of engineers’ work around issues of social justice, an argument reinforced by the results of textual analysis of student essay reflections on social justice in city planning. The results are a wide range of themes of critical reflection made by students arising from course activities. These included balancing social and environmental justice, like suburban segregation, planning ideals and, in some cases, challenges for the planning profession. We argue that these are valuable lessons for engineers, which can be achieved by combining practical experiences of planning practices with tools for advancing critical and analytical skills of engineering students. By analyzing engineering students’ views on solutions and challenges of addressing social justice in practice, we can improve our understanding of the engineering skills required to work with social justice. In this way, the study complements discussion and critiques of the relationships between society and engineering outlined in the rhetoric of engineering grand challenges, and contributes by discussing new roles for engineers in facing day-to-day challenges working with social justice.

Highlights

It’s the start of a new semester at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden
What is the role of social justice in engineering education and how should students understand it? These are questions that were central to the course SweSoc and will be developed here in order to situate some of the programmatic proposal made in the US and Europe to reform education
From the students’ arguments about social justice in Stockholm’s city planning, we identified a set of narratives about Husby and Hammarby Sjöstad that each relied on certain empirical examples to discuss how social justice related to city planning

Summary

Introduction

The students come here from Berlin, Burkina Faso, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Copenhagen, New York, Delhi, Beijing, Istanbul, Tokyo and Paris. As they gather in one of the larger auditoriums on campus, we the teachers ask them about previous studies. Safeguarding justice as fairness, according to Rawls, is the role of institutions, of which education is one. He stated, The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts. (Rawls 1971: 87)

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