The Theatre of Humanitarian Engineering

An experimental role-playing course designed by an interdisciplinary team of faculty from engineering and the humanities puts students imaginatively into a complex nineteenth-century context as they consider how to provide a waste management solution for an expanding urban population. This role-playing game (RPG) puts students in the roles of actual people living in a turn-of-the-century industrial city in central Massachusetts. While immersing themselves in the roles of engineers, industrialists, elected officials, workers, scientists, public health officials, inventors, and city residents, students learn and practice engineering concepts (engineering design, stakeholder analysis, mass balance, sewage treatment, material properties and selection, sewage properties and conveyance, statics and stress, filtration and chemical precipitation, and so on). These engineering concepts are not abstracted from social, political, and economic considerations. Rather, engineering is imbued with social context. The RPG offers students opportunities to reflect on economic, geographical, economic, and philosophical issues while learning the technical skills they need to make informed decisions to address the needs of a rapidly expanding population. Introduction and Statement of the Problem In 1945, when the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard sought to uncover the thought processes of mathematicians, he approached Albert Einstein, who suggested that “combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” For many years, educators have tried to design curricula that foster this associative learning —which, we know from our own experiences, is how we learn best outside of the classroom. Twenty-first century engineering educators have been mindful of ABET’s EC2000 student outcomes a-k, including ethical understanding, the ability to communicate effectively, and “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context.” Engineering educators who struggle to help students achieve these ABET learning outcomes might consider working together with liberal arts faculty to integrate engineering with humanities understanding. What the environmental historian William Cronon wished for liberal arts education is equally sought by engineering educators: “Only connect.” And yet our institutional environments discourage this “combinatory play” of disciplines, methods, and ways of thinking. The traditional means of integrating engineering and the humanities is through general education requirements, which students tend to take during their first two years, in lower-level survey courses. Here they learn a bit about history, writing, or philosophy, with the hope that they will remember and draw on this work once they dig into their major coursework and projects. But most of these lower-level general education courses focus on delivering content, often in large lectures. The methodology of the discipline, and opportunities for students to understand how a historian or philosopher or writer thinks, are reserved for history and philosophy and literature majors in their more advanced classes. In the general education curriculum, integrative learning is little more than a fantasy. For the engineering student, this approach often leads to compartmentalized learning, where students do not connect their general education courses to their engineering courses.