Designing, Codifying, and Implementing Social Justice Content in a Required Course on Engineering and Research Skills for First-Year Graduate Students

The field of engineering has traditionally been taught with the focus on the technical content, decoupling the scientific and technological advances from the societal goals and impacts (both intended and unintended) stemming from those advances. Not all members of society equally benefit from, contribute to the development of, or bear the burdens of the development process of engineering solutions to societal challenges. We believe that decoupling engineering from its impact on society devalues the social justice context of engineering and can further exacerbate the inequities of engineering research and advances. Further, we believe this content should be part of the engineering curriculum. We aim to address this by including curriculum and critical reflections on social justice and anti-racism centered around engineering research and development to a two-quarter long graduate student professional development course for matriculating PhD and MS students. To our knowledge, no other engineering graduate program has yet studied this kind of intervention. We aim to understand how students engage with social justice content in the contexts of engineering and research, specifically when presented with such content in a classroom setting. We seek to understand how student-student, student-faculty, and student-teaching assistant interactions impact student learning and comfort in discussing social justice. Our research questions probe students’ personal assessments of confidence and comfort in discussing social justice content through three surveys presented at different stages of the premiere iteration of the first quarter of the course in Fall 2022: at the beginning, mid-point, and end of the course. Additionally, weekly journal reflections from students are studied to track students’ reactions over time and evaluate the effectiveness of each lesson in achieving course objectives. This study, which will continue to be conducted over many years to track multiple cohorts of graduate students, aims to understand these interactions to ultimately aid engineering departments in implementing social justice content into their curricula; here we will highlight the findings from the course’s launch. In turn, the next generation of engineering researchers will not only be technically proficient, but also socially conscious in their careers, innovations, and lives.