The Philosophical Foundations of Technological and Engineering Literacy

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the importance of philosophy in discussions of technological literacy, and to point out that actionable definitions of technological literacy are not possible without philosophy. Technological literacy has been broadly conceived as relating to the designed world, which exists in conjunction with the natural and social worlds. Definitions of technology tacitly include the social world since social institutions produce technologies, governments regulate them, and engineers design them. Within this broad sphere, however, there are competing definitions of technological literacy that confuse the issue of how to best develop technological literacy in students through education. When one also considers engineering literacy, scientific literacy, math literacy and information literacy and the more recent push for economic and media literacy, these confusions are magnified. To make sense of the many definitions of technological literacy it helps to look broadly at the groups that promote them. Each group has an explicit or tacit epistemology, and considering the definitions that arise from these views help to illuminate the underlying aims and objectives of teaching technological or engineering literacy. Here we briefly look at five perspectives: understanding technology in society, training students to manage technology in their lives, the need to have a technically literate workforce, philosophy of technology, and engineering. While each viewpoint has underlying aims and philosophies, the perspective of understanding technology in society provides a sufficiently expansive view so that meaningful problems can be posed and addressed by students. We explore some of the problems this view suggests and find that technological literacy can be taught as a transdisciplinary area of study (science, technology, and society programs), an area of philosophical inquiry (philosophy of technology), or in ways that organize inquiry across disciplines so students develop a personal philosophy. Background Interest in technological literacy as a concept has grown since the late 1950’s. Krupczak and Blake (Blake & Krupczak Jr., 2014) have charted development of the concept, looking particularly at the intersection of technological literacy with engineering literacy. It should be noted that the term “technological literacy” is more commonly used in the United States than other nations. A sense of how technological literacy has become more prevalent in conversations on education can be seen by looking at the word frequency of the term using the Ngram viewing tool (Google, 2010). While this tool has significant biases and limitations (Pechenick, Danforth, & Dodds, 2015) the relatively high representation of scientific and technical literature in the corpus and the fact that “technological literacy” has a specific meaning that is not generally found in fiction permits a qualitative view of the rise in use of the term over a time frame of decades, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Google NGram word frequency vs. time graph of the terms “technological literacy”, “science literacy”, and “information literacy” (value divided by five) for 2012 dataset of American English with a smoothing of 1 for the time period 1970 2008. The term technological literacy seems to have first come into use around the 1950’s where it was used more by happenstance than deliberately. Before 1980 technological literacy most often referred to the benefits of, or need for: vocational education, skills for living in a world with rapid technological change, and to denote measures of technical competence. The steady rise starting around 1980 coincides with the time that personal computers became both popular and affordable; for example the IBM PC was introduced in 1981. The accessibility of technology to all age groups has only grown since then (Mawson, 2007). The 1980’s was also the decade technological literacy began to come under increasing consideration in higher education by policy makers (The Committee to Idenfity Critical Issues in Federal Support for Science and Technology, 1986), foundations such as Sloan (Florman, 1987), and the AAAS through Project 2061 (Rutherford, 1989). The 1990’s saw increasing interest in technological literacy at the policy level (The Board for Engineering Education, 1994) where elements in government began to consider the role of technological literacy as a requirement for broad education and elements of technological literacy were integrated into the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996). The use of the term became even more prevalent in the US after 2000 when it was extended to K-12 education with the introduction of No Child Left Behind. This farreaching legislation required schools to use technology to increase student achievement, ensure students were technologically literate by the completion of the eighth grade, and have teachers to adopt technology in the classroom (Knezek, 2003). The International Technology Education Association (now ITEEA), a group that had represented industrial arts for decades, developed technological literacy standards as they sought to reframe their relevance in a changing educational environment. During the same period the National Academy of Engineering released several influential publications that broadly sought to clarify technological literacy and its distinction from engineering literacy (Garmire & Pearson, 2006; National Academy of Engineering & National Research Council, 2002). It is worth noting that a parallel term, “scientific literacy” is used with roughly the same frequency and the same rapid rise from the 1980 onward, see Figure 1. Both of these terms are often associated with perceived crises in science, engineering, or technology education. Such crises have been discussed within engineering in the United States for almost as long as there have been engineering programs (Cheville, 2014) due to the perception that STEM education is closely tied to economic growth and security (Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century, 2006, 2010). Despite the large role engineering plays in the economy (Carnevale, Smith, & Melton, 2011) there are far fewer references to “engineering literacy”, a term promoted by ASEE’s Technological and Engineering Literacy and Philosophy of Engineering Division (Krupczak Jr. et al., 2012). Other terms related to technological literacy are “information literacy” which is about five to ten times more prevalent, “math literacy”, and more recently “media literacy”. The increasing interest in technological literacy has led to many attempts to define what technological literacy actually is (Blake & Krupczak Jr., 2014; Cheek, 1992; Dakers, 2006; Dyrenfurth, 1992; Gagel, 1997). Converging to a single, concise definition has been difficult. Rather than precise definitions the existing literature focuses more on sets of descriptors that are adopted by particular communities such as K-12 educators, STS researchers, or policy makers. In the remainder of this paper we briefly contrast existing descriptions and discuss the positions and belief systems underlying these definitions, showing that each adopts particular philosophies. We then explore several reasons for why technological literacy may be difficult to define, finding that technological literacy is better identified as a set of issues or problems rather than definitions. In this analysis we first assume that every attempt to define technological literacy is made in support of an existing belief system. Second, we recognize that the needs of educators who operate under real and pressing constraints are different from those who view technological literacy at a distance from the reality of teaching. Disparate Definitions of Technological Literacy As technological literacy has come to drive high stakes educational outcomes, attempts to define what is meant by the term have increased. Here we focus on a set of definitions created by different groups who have some stake in defining technological literacy. Although we discuss them separately, in reality these groups are not isolated; a Venn diagram would be highly intersecting. Science, Technology, and Society: One group consists of the researchers and academics who work in the area broadly defined as Science, Technology, and Society (STS). This group seeks to understand relationships between, and the impacts of, intersections of social and technical systems. They also engage with history, sociology, and philosophy, as exemplified by the work of Mitcham (Mitcham, 1994), as they seek to understand how the value systems that drive technology’s impact with society. An early review of curricular frameworks that incorporated STS content or ideas identified 29 descriptors drawn from four general categories—knowledge, skills, ethics and values, and action/involvement—that can be applied to many forms of literacy (Cheek, 1992). A later study (Gagel, 1997) defined technological literacy as being able to: “(a) accommodate and cope with rapid and continuous technological change, (b) generate creative and innovative solutions for technological problems, (c) act through technological knowledge both effectively and efficiently, and (d) assess technology and its involvement with the human lifeworld judiciously.” Generally STS-derived definitions of technological literacy address the need to educate individuals for living in a technologically mediated world and are system oriented, involve elements of the ethical and moral dimensions of society, and are both critical and integrative, questioning the often accepted formula that “science + technology + democracy (+ capitalism) + education = progress” (Wonacott, 2001). In essence the STS perspective is ontological, exploring how technology interfaces with and is an organizing force in society. Educators: Another set of definitions arise from educators and the