Students at Queens University are critiquing common sense views of engineering in a course entitled ‘Engineering and Social: Critical Theories of Technological Practice’. The idea of engineering focussed on social justice challenges the view many engineering students have of their future profession. In this talk I will present a study, which explores these challenges as a potential threshold for students. The threshold concept framework of Meyer and Land (2003,2006,2008) proposes that students need to pass through a threshold or a liminal space in order to learn new ways of thinking and that this might prove troublesome for some. This embryonic theory has proven useful for exploring how engineering students approach the notion of social justice in their current and future profession and practice. Drawing on Fleck (1979) and Wenger’s (1998) ideas that thought collectives and communities of practice can provide resistance toward new ways of thinking or seeing we conducted a study of students endeavouring to pass through a new threshold for engineering, that of ‘seeing through the lens of social justice’. Implications and educational considerations of the findings will be discussed, alongside a discussion of how we might apply the theory of threshold concepts to other areas of engineering education.

References

Fleck, L. (1979). Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Meyer, J. H. F., & Land, R. (2003). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: Linkages to ways of thinking and practicing within the disciplines. ETL Project Occasional Report 4. Retrieved November 26, 2007, from http://www.tla.ed.ac.uk/etl/docs/ETLreport4.pdf.

Meyer, J. H. F., & Land, R. (2006). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: issues of liminality. In J. H. F. Meyer & R. Land (Eds.), Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (pp. 19-32). London and New York: Routledge.

Meyer, J. H. F., Land, R., & Davies, P. (2008). Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge (4): Issues of variation and variability. In R. Land, J. H. F. Meyer, & J. Smith (Eds.), Threshold Concepts within the Disciplines (pp. 59-74). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Caroline Baillie is the Dupont Canada Chair of Engineering Education Research and Development at Queens University, Kingston, Ontario. She is cross appointed into Chemical Engineering, Sociology and Women’s studies. Her role is to enhance the learning experience of engineering students across the Faculty whilst maintaining her research and teaching interests in education, materials science and engineering. She is particularly interested in ways in which science and engineering can help to create solutions for the environment as well as social problems. She has spent over 12 years exploring creative thinking in engineering problem solving and hosting workshops and talks in many different countries. Two books have arisen from this work: ‘CASE: Creativity in Art, Science and Engineering’ (with Simon Dewulf) and ‘The Travelling CASE’. She also directs the global ‘Engineering and Social Justice’ network with George Catalano and applies this to her own technical work on low cost natural fibre composites for developing countries She has over 160 publications, papers and books in materials science and education. Her most recent books include a Woodhead publication, “Green Composites’, a Routledge publication ‘Effective learning and teaching in engineering’ and an edited Campus volume ‘Travelling facts: the social construction, distribution and accumulation of knowledge’.