Mind the Gap: Exploring the Exploring the Perceived Gap Between Social and Technical Aspects of Engineering for Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Within engineering education, there is a perceived distinct binary separating social and technical thoughts. Students often describe engineering work in terms of technical matters such as doing things faster, cheaper, or more efficiently, while disregarding the social contexts and social costs of these decisions. This study examines students describing their decisions to major in engineering, and how a department and classes designed specifically to tackle the sociotechnical divide in engineering influenced students' perception of engineering. In this study, we highlight how students emphasize the distinction between social and technical contexts in their thinking as they conceptualize what it means to be an engineer. The University of the Borderland (pseudonym) created a new energy class, with the goal of examining the global energy landscape and considering contemporary sociotechnical challenges related to energy. The course was developed to provide an “integrated” approach to energy concepts that crossed disciplinary boundaries. We collected data from interviews to explore how students described their decision to major in engineering and tensions with subsequent descriptions of what is engineering. Preliminary results indicate that the sociotechnical divide still exists in the engineering culture amongst these students. Although students talked about social aspects of engineering work, these are seen as lesser, rather than a fundamental part of, engineering problem solving. Students continued to make a distinction between “soft” skills and engineering skills, while simultaneously describing the “soft” skills as necessary to be a “good” engineer.