Introducing Engineering And Technology To Non Majors: Benefits, Challenges, And Opportunities In Offering A Technological Literacy Course

The National Academy of Engineering and other organizations have stressed the need for the general public to be better informed about engineering and technology. To help address this concern, engineering and engineering technology departments can develop and offer courses on technological literacy for non-majors. This paper will discuss the author’s experience in developing and offering such a course for non-majors at a small state university with a strong attachment to the liberal arts. The course is intended to give students a basic appreciation of technology and of the engineering profession, an understanding of how technological progress occurs, a recognition of how technological change has both positive and negative effects on the way people live, a sense of both the potentials and the limits of technological progress, and, finally, a vision of things to come. Students who complete the course should be better able to make informed decisions on technological issues as citizens and in their careers. When offering a technological literacy course for non-majors, one challenge is to attract students to the course. The paper will discuss target audiences and ideas on how to make the course appealing to students. If faculty colleagues in other departments recognize the value of technological literacy in their own areas, they may be willing to recommend such a course to their students. To this end, the paper will also discuss possible links with other academic departments. The breadth of backgrounds necessary to do justice to the topic suggests a course with instructors from different disciplines, and the paper will include discussion of this option. While this is difficult to arrange in the common university environment, the result would be a better course, and this arrangement would be helpful in attracting students. Even if only one instructor is assigned, interested faculty in other departments can help to improve the course and to attract more students. Introduction Examples of technological developments affecting human society and of human society’s efforts to channel technological development are found throughout human history. Despite the long record of historical evidence of their impact on society, our standards for an educated person do not include any study of technology or of engineering. Efforts to include technological literacy in education 1 seek to address this omission. Our standards for an educated individual have a direct link to the distant past. We can match much of our current general education core requirements to the seven liberal arts as defined in the Middle Ages and drawing on earlier times: the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. 3 If you compare this to the general education core at the author’s university, students are now required to complete courses in composition and public speaking (grammar and rhetoric), mathematics (arithmetic & geometry), natural sciences (the offerings include astronomy), and the humanities (music and the other fine arts). The university core also includes history and the social sciences. While logic is the subject of a specific course or courses in philosophy, students are required to hone their skills in grammar, rhetoric, and logic in all of these courses. As the body of human knowledge has expanded and divided into more subfields, the list of specific subjects in core requirements has expanded. It has not expanded, however, to include engineering or technology. As noted by Bugliarello, these topics need to be need to be included in a modern quadrivium. 2 While the topics currently included in the university core are important for an educated person, they are not sufficient. The very function of modern human society depends on technology and the engineering expertise necessary to develop and manage that technology. While the questions of how things work can be answered based on knowledge of physical science, this alone is not sufficient to explain how things can be made to work and how things come into being. The study of science alone does not explain how things are designed and made, whether those things are individual devices, or the systems necessary for their manufacture and use. Science alone may be sufficient to explain the proposed mechanism for global warming, yet getting from the problem to a solution without catastrophic disruption to human society requires more than just scientific knowledge; it requires engineering knowledge and the ability to use technology. How do we add the study of engineering and technology to the curriculum? How do we attract students? What are we, as engineering and engineering technology faculty, best prepared to teach about engineering and technology? The most straightforward method for us as faculty to address this issue is to offer a course (or courses) in technological literacy. For this to be successful, we must develop a course that both serves the purpose of teaching technological literacy and is clearly relevant to non-majors and we must be able to attract students to this course. In content and assignments, the course will be a significant departure from most engineering courses, as we will be taking a broad view of engineering and technology, instead of focusing on specific areas of knowledge needed for engineering practice. The course must take a broad view of technology and of engineering, and must examine the effects of technological change on society as well as the influence of society on technological change. This goes into the realms of business, politics, sociology, and history. Engineering education has not traditionally included this sort of study; one could argue that this omission has been detrimental to the profession. Recognition of need and interest in this area is growing, as evidenced by efforts by the National Academy of Engineering 1 and the National Science Foundation 4 and the development of an active group in the American Society for Engineering Education. A small and growing number of institutions have developed and offered a course or courses to help non-majors learn about engineering and technology, and about the relationship between technology and society. A review of twelve such courses is given by Ollis and Krupczak 5 . The concept of technological literacy appears to have evolved along with some of these courses, leading to interest in developing formal standards for assessment 6,7 . The author’s department has for some time had a course in the bulletin called “Technology and Society.” Several years ago, the opportunity presented itself for the author to teach this course with a target of offering the class at least once a year. This is an upper level course, making it useful as an elective course and especially attractive to community college graduates seeking a bachelor’s degree and needing to meet upper division credit requirements. Prior to that, the author had the very pleasant and intellectually challenging experience of working in partnership (as the junior partner) with a colleague in the history department who wanted to offer a course in the history of technology. Finally, the author is the primary instructor for our introductory course for freshmen entering our program. The mission of our introductory course for new majors has some things in common with the mission of a course introducing engineering and technology to non-majors. Others have been down the same path and have reported on their experiences in developing courses and attracting students. 4, 5; 8-14 The content, approach, and level of existing courses vary. Some institutions have accepted the course into the general core to meet natural science requirements. Many courses focus on how things work and include laboratory components. The course discussed in depth by David Ollis 8, 9, 10 evolved from a device dissection course for first year engineering students, and has a strong lab component in that area linked to discussion of context and content. Some courses, such as the course developed by John Krupczak at Hope College, link discussion of technology to the scientific principles behind the device. 5 Many of the courses are designed for first year students, such as the courses described by Ohland 11 and Soysal and Soysal. 12 Two common goals are to help students understand engineering and to make informed decisions about technological issues facing society. Rosa et al described a one year course sequence along these lines. 13 Carlson argues for a broad perspective focusing on the interaction of society with technology, and uses historical examples as case studies. 14 Taken together, it appears that courses have evolved in part to meet needs at specific institutions. This paper will share the author’s experiences to date in introducing and attracting students to a course in technological literacy at the author’s institution. Finding Students for the Course This experience with course development and teaching technological literacy comes in the context of a small state university with a history as a normal school and a more recent designation as a liberal arts university. In addition to common programs found in a college of arts and sciences, the school also has programs in education, business, and nursing. The institution has a satellite campus, where the university offers degrees in criminal justice and professional studies, as well as other areas. The criminal justice program has an emphasis on homeland security. Ideally, the importance of technological literacy would be recognized by faculty colleagues across academic disciplines and by administrators, and a course in technological literacy would be added to core requirements for all students. This is unlikely to occur. As noted, the common core requirements focus on traditional topics – composition and public speaking, history, humanities, social sciences, mathematics, and natural scienc