Engineering and Social Justice: In the University and Beyond

6. Community colleges, engineering, and social justice

123 D Chapter 6 d community collegeS, engineering, and Social juStice Lisa A. McLoughlin theory If social justice is “the provision of equal life opportunities and conditions across demographic categories” (Slaton, 2010, p. 24), and we would like the study and practice of engineering to increase social justice, then intervention into both engineering education and the larger social constructs that surround it is required.By bringing nontraditional students into engineering, community colleges promote social justice in three ways. First, community colleges seek to increase social justice for the students themselves, to allow them to increase life opportunities and improve life conditions directly by earning more money, and more comprehensively by providing analytical tools to understand, critique, and navigate the unequal power distribution within our society.In the course of their liberal engineering education,students develop a more robust sociological imagination (Mills,1959),and with it the increased capacity to view and then utilize their experiences to enact social change. Recognizing that in a society that relies more and more on scientific reasoning, power is accessed via a science-based education (Brown & Clignet,2000),this is a direct approach to increasing life opportunities and improving life conditions for an underrepresented group. This leads to the second effect of community colleges on social justice,which is increasing diversity among students and practitioners in the field of engineering. Here there are two social justice effects. First, including more demographically diverse students and practitioners directly forwards the democratic component (Catalano, 2006) of peace and social justice . Further, it improves engineering as a field by increasing the diversity of expertise and experiences engineers can engage in defining and solving problems. This in turn improves design solutions (Savery, 2006) and increases the potential of engineering as a field to address previously overlooked problems. Third,community colleges work to increase social justice within the culture of engineering education. A social justice perspective (Evans, 2008) provides a framework for viewing the current engineering educational culture as socially constructed around a certain elite type of student, one with the leisure and money to make school his/her first priority. The goal then is to imagine the engineering educational environment working more harmoni- community collegeS, engineering, and Social juStice 124 ously with multidimensional people from more than one traditional background. In order for the engineering educational environment to actively support the success of more than one type of student,adaptations should take into account all“students’social identities and the connection of power and privilege to those identities, as well as cultural competency in relation to those identities” (Hackman, 2008, p. 26). Universal instructional design combined with a social justice perspective suggests such innovations would help all engineering students succeed (Hackman, 2008), not just those with nontraditional profiles. The experience community colleges have working with students from nontraditional backgrounds can help improve the culture of engineering education in four-year schools. This chapter includes suggestions for institutional and curricular adaptations that are more welcoming and effective for all. Practice Over the last few decades,engineering educators have identified several reasons why the recruitment and retention of a diverse student body has been difficult.First,there are academic reasons linked to socioeconomic class. In the United States, millions of students (Kuenzi, 2008) receive a pre-college education inadequate to prepare them to enter an engineering program upon high school graduation. This occurs more often among students of low socioeconomic class, not least because their schools are more often inadequate (McCabe & Day, 1998). The inadequacy is reflected in two related areas: pre-engineering academic content in math, science, and information literacy; and basic student skills such as organization and learning strategies. A second reason recruitment and retention of engineers from low socioeconomic classes is difficult is for nonacademic reasons, a mismatch between the lives of nontraditional students and the expectations of engineering curricula. Engineering education has largely been structured around an elite student body, so nontraditional students who need to work or have family obligations seldom choose engineering. Combined, these differences in education and life circumstances intertwine to create students whose needs engineering education has yet to address. This chapter discusses the role of community colleges in bringing students with nontraditional academic or life circumstances to engineering education, describes their demographic and academic characteristics , and suggests ways four-year engineering educational institutions could better recruit them and promote their success. methodology This chapter is based on five years of qualitative study of community college engineering studentsviasurvey,fouryearsof participant-observationasfacultyandengineeringprogram cochair,andover850hoursof academicadvisingof engineeringstudentsatGreenfieldCommunity...