Humanizing Signals and Systems: A Reflective Account

In this paper, I authentically and reflectively depict my journey as an engineering educator delving in the challenge of integrating technical content of a continuous-time signals and systems class with the social, value-laden realities that encompass such concepts. I refer to this particular challenge as humanizing the technical content of signals and systems. Specifically, I describe the signals and systems course and how I structured content and assessment plans to create space for human values. Additionally, I critically examine how some barriers that worked against my efforts. Finally, I share practical strategies and lessons learned for cultivating integrative ways of thinking about engineering science concepts. Introduction: Why Attempt to Humanize Signals and Systems? A cursory examination of perhaps any commentary on engineering education reveals a depiction of a ubiquitously desired product of an engineering degree: a master of technical knowledge that can also demonstrate competence among people and consciousness about technical work in relation to people. Such an integrated form of social and technical, or sociotechnical, competence has formed an underlying premise for visions for the future of engineering practice as well as accreditation outcomes for engineering programs. Yet, while promoting a desire for sociotechnical competence and consciousness, these numerous documents also characterize engineering education as a place where technical forms of competence are prioritized greatly over social forms. Indeed, a growing body of scholarship suggests that when engineering students exclusively engage scientific and mathematical ways of knowing, they disengage from human dimensions of engineering. For example, in her ethnographic research on practicing engineers, Faulkner depicts a clear dualism of the technical and social, noting that “engineering professional training, identities and practice are permeated by a strong sense of the technical, which specifically excludes the social” (p. 764). Additionally, Trevelyan’s ethnographic studies of engineers resonate with Faulkner’s claim, maintaining that “[e]ngineers tend to share an identity mainly framed in terms of the solitary technical: problem-solving and design.” (p. 176). Further, Bucciarelli’s ethnographic studies of early career engineers specifically draw attention to the engineer’s disciplinary knowledge of mathematics and engineering sciences in order to frame engineering practice as emphasizing “object worlds” (p. 5) 11 while de-emphasizing inescapably social processes of engineering design. Other studies reinforce such findings by showing that while seemingly technical ways of engineering thinking and doing involve manifold social processes, even if these processes are not always recognized as social. Where might this social-technical dualism originate? Several scholars suggest that this dualistic thinking develops in the course of taking engineering science courses. Indeed, the aforementioned commentaries, reports, and statements about how engineering ought to be, often seem to call for an engineer with broader skills than technical. Yet Downey has critically challenged such a premise, commenting, “[t]o focus on broadening may be to lose the battle at the outset because it preserves a distinction between technical core and non-technical P ge 26866.2 periphery... Accordingly, the challenge today is not to broaden it but to rethink and redefine its core” (emphasis mine). Other studies corroborate Downey’s claim. For example, Cech convincingly demonstrated that, while progressing through the core engineering curriculum, students’ interest in public welfare declined. Additionally, in their study on engineering senior design students, Downey & Lucena illustrated the tendency of such students to resort to deterministic mindsets when approaching highly social and ambiguous design problems. Though such Downey’s recommendation to “rethink and redefine [the technical] core” is insightful, instructors of engineering science courses find scant resources available to help them imbue social competence and consciousness in engineering science courses. Certainly, Riley has developed a companion text that includes several textured examples of content found in thermodynamics courses, which elicit engineering students to engage, analyze, and reflect on a certain engineering science topic, drawing on scientific, personal, and social-scientific evidence. However, such resources that guide an instructor to integrate technical content with a complex social reality are certainly an exception rather than a norm. Reflective Practice versus “Best” Practice With this background in mind, we return to the question that began the former section: Why attempt to humanize signals and systems? Or in other words, why attempt to guide students in learning well-established technical concepts as integrated with a complex, value-rich, social reality? These are questions that the reader might have asked when beginning this paper. These were questions asked by some of my students. And these were certainly questions that I continued to ask of myself. There are at least two ways I could respond to this question. On one hand, I could respond to the question, “Why attempt to humanize signals and systems?” In doing so, I could demonstrate to the reader how prior scholarship as well as data from my class should persuade them to humanize technical content. This approach is often seen in papers that promote a “best practice”, or a certain technique that may be used in other institutional settings. On the other hand, I could respond to the question, “Why attempt to humanize signals and systems?” In doing so, I could recognize that many factors, beyond prior scholarship and evidence-based practices, factor into instructors’ attempts to incorporate a change of practice into our classrooms. In contrast to the best practice option discussed earlier, this approach might be called a paper to describe reflective practice. Indeed, as I tread the path of designing and teaching continuous-time signals and systems (CTSS), scholarly work kept me motivated to continue the journey. However, such evidence-based scholarship did little to support me in the workaday insecurities of integrating human values in a traditionally abstract CTSS course. It did little to aid my recovery from gaffes that I brought to the classroom, which at times, compromised my efforts to integrate human values and technical content. In this paper, I adopt a reflective posture to discuss my journey as an instructor that attempted to humanize the technical content of a CTSS course. Similar to papers framed as best practices, I do describe of the course, the techniques that I employed to integrate human values in the course, and some preliminary results of these interventions. However, rather than accentuating the P ge 26866.3 mechanism of these interventions, I write to authentically depict my journey in embodying these pedagogical methods. By adopting a reflective stance in discussing this course, I am contributing to knowledge that relates to the experiential process of becoming an instructor rather than the techniques that undergird teaching. As put by Schön, “If teaching is to be seen as a form of scholarship, then the practice of teaching must be seen as giving rise to new forms of knowledge” (p. 31). This critical account is concerned about making my own “practice of teaching” visible that it might add to the engineering education community discourse, not only regarding how we might better integrate human values with technical content, but also how we might better embody this integrated content as an instructor. Thus, in this spirit, I discuss the following sections with a commitment to providing a textured description of my “practice of teaching”. In the sections that follow, I describe the CTSS course, both in a general sense and how it manifests at my university. I then discuss my own background in relation to the technical content of CTSS as well as my motivation to integrate human values with these concepts. Following this, I elaborate on how I designed the course to humanize technical content, and then how this plan actually transpired. Finally, I conclude by discussing overarching lessons learned from this experience and future directions. Throughout the paper, I rely on data from my own personal log that I maintained as an instructor, reflective entries from the fourteen students in the class, and submissions from a design task completed at the beginning and end of the semester, as described in a later section. The collection and use data was approved by Harding University’s Institutional Review Board.