Work in progress: Liberal arts help engineering students change the world

Abstract

As part of the ongoing work described in Work in Progress: Transformation through Liberal Arts-Focused Grand Challenges Scholars Programs (from the ASEE 2019 Annual Conference and Exposition), a professor of environmental engineering and a professor of the history of science and technology collaborated to add a new liberal arts course to the engineering curriculum at Olin College of Engineering in spring 2019. That work suggested that students learn new ways of thinking, knowing, doing, and being through participation in a transformative liberal-arts infused Grand Challenges Scholars Program. This project-based course was created with learning objectives of communication, critical thinking and reflection, identity development, and embracing many ways of knowing and being. Learning experiences provided scaffolding for students to identify and prioritize the impacts they hope to make in the world; explore paths for making these impacts possible; and begin to share these experiences, values, and ambitions with various audiences. The course asked students to engage with questions such as: As individuals and engineers, how should we pose ethical questions and prepare to advocate for the values that we hold dear? How might we start to understand and react to larger global problems, causes, challenges, and opportunities that surround us? Who am I and what is my place in the world? The course was a new, experimental offering. The two instructors heavily involved students in shaping the design of the course both in the planning process prior to the start of the semester, as well as through detailed feedback activities during the semester. This paper will explain the goals of the course and will offer an analysis of student responses to the learning experience--which were overwhelmingly positive--based on various feedback mechanisms. Drawing upon the analysis of these data and on the experience of co-creating and co-teaching this course, we have also compiled lessons learned about how to design such a course and the most successful techniques used to achieve desired student outcomes. We conclude with next steps for revising and expanding these learning experiences, which are being implemented in 2020. This entire analysis is embedded in a larger ongoing study of how a liberal arts-focused Grand Challenges Scholars Program can successfully provide transformative learning experiences for students. The experience related herein serves as an illustration of how liberal arts content and methods can be deployed within an engineering curriculum to help students better position their course of study and their professional ambitions within a larger personal narrative and a sense of purpose in the wider world.