Citizen Engineering: Disrupting Expertise in Classroom and Community

A new engineering course at a large land-grant university seeks to introduce non-engineers to the profession via a combination of artistic endeavors, social science analyses, engineering design thinking, and community practice. The course introduces a new concept, “citizen engineering,” borrowed from a tradition of citizen science in which community members (“non-experts”) identify scientific questions and proceed through a formal process, such as participatory action research, to seek answers to their questions by defining and driving their own processes of inquiry and analysis, sometimes but not always with the cooperation of trained scientists. The course first introduces multiple definitions of engineering and citizenship for critical discussion, develops the idea of citizen engineering from citizen science, and then proceeds to a unit on Making where students ponder through examination of examples from art exhibits and popular media what kinds of activities might constitute Making, and which might constitute citizen engineering, and why. The students engage in various Making activities including a short project in which they design and build prototypes of an artifact to improve dorm life. After this, students gain an introduction to engineering studies through analysis of the co-construction of technology and society, and through examining the roles of citizens in large engineering projects such as nuclear power or gas pipelines. Throughout the course there is an underlying argument that non-engineers can and should engage engineering, problematizing the notion of engineering expertise as unique. A series of short essays encourage students to analyze engineering as a profession and consider their own roles as citizen engineers with the power to intervene as nonexperts in engineering activities that impact society. In this first iteration of the course, one of the authors served as a participant-observer and ethnographer focused on student learning. The observer witnessed student engagement with course topics and with one another, and interviewed all the students in the class (n=5) individually. Using the observer’s analysis of his observation notes and interview responses, and using the instructors’ analysis of student work and course feedback, we reflect on the outcomes of this first iteration of the course and consider avenues for improvement. Although the course was designed for non-engineers and particularly students outside of STEM fields, those who enrolled for this iteration were three seniors majoring in the sciences, and three first year students who intend to major in engineering but are not yet admitted to the engineering college. This population of students struggled with critical analysis and in particular with the central argument of the course that engineering ought to be democratized, that non-engineers can make crucial contributions that improve engineering practice and hold engineering accountable for its roles in society. Improved reading selection, better scaffolding for more challenging readings, alterations to pace and depth for certain concepts such as ethics, and smoothing out logistical challenges with the course should result in improved student learning. Introduction A new engineering course at a large land-grant university seeks to introduce non-engineers to the profession via a combination of artistic endeavors, social science analyses, engineering design thinking, and community practice. The course introduces a new concept, “citizen engineering,” borrowed from a tradition of citizen science in which community members (“non-experts”) identify scientific questions and proceed through formal processes, such as participatory action research, to systematically seek answers to their questions by defining and driving their own processes of inquiry and analysis, sometimes but not always with the cooperation of trained scientists.. Extending this analogy to engineering additionally entails community participation in engineering processes such as problem formulation, establishing design criteria, ideation, evaluation of design alternatives, Making and fabrication, iteration, and more. In this paper we provide background on course development in our institutional context; motivate the course organizational theme of Citizen Engineering; describe learning outcomes developed from research findings and the course content and activities designed to meet those outcomes; describe findings from independent course observations, student feedback, and evaluation of student work; and reflect on the course, discuss administrative obstacles we encountered, and identify paths for future research and course development. Context and Background The new Citizen Engineering Course builds on two traditions at the institution: the presence of a strong Science and Technology in Society (STS) department in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, and the university’s Curriculum for Liberal Education (CLE), which ensures graduates attain knowledge across six classic content areas in the liberal arts, and is currently under revision in academic year 2015-16. Our STS program has a core strength in Engineering Studies, and has offered a course since 1995, Engineering Cultures, which helps engineers understand and reflect on their own problemsolving activities as perspectives that both could have been otherwise and must live amidst other perspectives. The principal means is to help students learn about engineering in different times and places sufficiently that they can recognize, understand, respect, and possibly even value perspectives other than their own. For students trained to understand problems as given and answers as either right or wrong, putting in historical and global perspective what they value in themselves is no easy task. This course has been replicated and enhanced at other institutions around the country and online, and is part of the CLE at our institution. Against this backdrop, our institution received a WIDER grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct research to elicit and characterize essential components of engineering literacy, with the aim of making engineering literacy part of the Curriculum for Liberal Education. Where the Engineering Cultures course offers engineers an opportunity to develop cultural competencies through the CLE, a new course would be designed to offer engineering competency development to non-engineers. The course was designed based on findings from the first year of the project identifying core competencies for engineering literacy and characterizing how faculty and students value excellence in teaching and active learning within the liberal education curriculum. These were developed from a literature review, a review of CLE course syllabi, teaching evaluation surveys, interviews, and focus groups, building a broad and expansive conceptualization “with engineering knowledge as a key component in discussing and offering critical perspectives about issues that surround social needs.” The components used in the course were ultimately adapted from Chae and colleagues’ work and included abilities to do the following: ● discuss, critique, and make decisions about national, local, and personal issues that involve engineering solutions; ● understand and explain how basic societal needs (e.g., water, food, and energy) are processed, produced, and transported; ● solve basic problems faced in everyday life by employing concepts and models of science, technology, and mathematics. Why Citizen Engineering? Unlike its parallel, citizen science, the phrase citizen engineering has not been in common use. A book on engineering ethics entitled Citizen Engineer emphasizes the duties of professional engineers to act as citizens (i.e. work in the public interest), but it does not consider democratized notions of non-engineer citizens engaging engineering. Ed Layton’s history of the formation of engineering as a profession in the US in the Progressive Era reveals some early conceptualizations of engineers working in the public interest, or at least citing the public interest as a noble aspiration for the profession. However, Layton carefully shows how engineers are primarily concerned with the status of the profession and therefore reserve for themselves alone a sphere of action as privileged experts isolated from the very public that the profession purports to serve. Engineering historian Matt Wisnioski documents a 1960s resurgence of engineers working toward the public interest through projects such as Volunteers in Technical Assistance (VITA) and the Committee for Social Responsibility in Engineering (CSRE). While the former employed volunteerism and appropriate technology frameworks and the latter focused on social action in opposition to the military-industrial complex, neither group questioned the role of engineers as technical experts in society. These notions stand in contrast to the strong tradition in certain strands of citizen science – of democratization of science and community collaborations in which expertise is shared. It is this contrast of orientations toward expertise that caused us to frame the course around a concept of citizen engineering that parallels the democratized strain of citizen science. The authors’ prior experience in science and engineering classrooms and in community-based learning projects related to engineering suggest that disrupting the notion of engineers’ expertise is central to both non-engineers gaining confidence to attempt engineering and engineers developing epistemic humility to work across disciplines. Therefore, the disruption of engineering expertise is a central goal of the course. We use disruption here not as innovation jargon but rather in the common sense of a disturbance that interrupts one’s course. By questioning the commonly held assumption, shared by engineers and non-engineers alike, that engineers hold, or ou