Not engineering to help but learning to (un)learn: Integrating research and teaching on epistemologies of technology design at the margins

Abstract

Locating engineering education projects in sites occupied by marginalized communities and populations serves primarily to reinforce the misapprehension that the inhabitants of such sites are illiterate, inept, incapable and therefore in need of aid or assistance from researchers, faculty and students. Drawing on the emerging literature on engineering education and social justice, I examine the stated objectives, content, duration, and outcomes of exemplar projects to develop a critique of the epistemological and axiological assumptions and privileges of educators, scholars and students who engage with communities that exist on the margins. I argue that as students, teachers, and researchers, we equate the minds of those who occupy economic and social margins with the possession of marginal intellect when we set out to help or aid them without recognizing the validity of and valorizing their ways of knowing. Learning how members of socially and economically marginalized communities apply their minds, mouths, hands and feet to solve locally occurring problems may help us interrogate our scholarly, pedagogical, and ethical objectives in a more reflexive manner. Drawing on ethnographic research and writing carried out across 11 months across 25 rural, semi-urban, and urban communities in India and the United States, I demonstrate how we may begin to recognize and relinquish our positions of privilege by observing local epistemologies of technology design while apprenticing the otherwise marginalized as they go about solving everyday problems. Such local epistemologies are articulated through knowledge practices that are communicative, relational and situated in local social and material contexts. I contend that our task is to learn from those who we otherwise imagine as being in need of the knowledge, skills and expertise located in academe. I employed a combination of open-ended interviews, guided conversations, and participant-observation of individual artisans, farmers, entrepreneurs, and their family members, friends and local collaborators to learn about the ways in which those who lack access to formal education or formal institutional support have developed novel, affordable technological solutions for problems in their local communities. My analysis suggests that individuals who develop technological innovations at the margins are motivated by a perceived responsibility toward their local communities. Such grassroots innovators articulate this perceived responsibility by remaining sanguine about the imitation of their designs by others. Their openness in sharing design-related knowledge is associated with the adoption of an empathic design process in which innovators leverage their social and material embeddedness in local communities to observe and reflect on users' technology-related behavior in naturalistic settings. Grassroots innovators engage with human needs in specific geographical, economic, social, and cultural contexts and embody the potential for knowledge-rich, resource-poor communities to develop successful indigenous solutions to local problems. Grassroots innovations represent a community-based and user-driven model of technology design based on empathy, sustainability and social responsibility that problematize rational, economic models of competitive innovation for profit that are prevalent in the literature and industry. Finally, I outline my efforts over the past two years to incorporate these findings into the syllabi and classes I teach to engineering majors studying a required course technical communication. This report of my pedagogical efforts is provided so that colleagues who share an interest in social justice may critique and improve my efforts at achieving coherent and sustainable pedagogical translations of my research on technology design at the grassroots. As engineering education scholarship develops its transnational agenda, I also offer this research design, my findings, and pedagogical efforts as points of entry for scholars and educators to reconfigure the relationship between teachers, learners, and the contexts in which their interactions are situated.