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Though ABET’s Criteria 2000 stops short of questioning corporate or military values, liberative pedagogies make them a central topic of discussion, a shift that may hold the key for attracting more underrepresented groups to engineering.

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Another key goal of liberative (and many other) pedagogies is for students to take charge of their own learning. One way of doing this is to encourage student reflections on learning, what is called “meta-cognitive” analysis in other contexts.

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Students had an initial tendency to take the written reflective assignments too lightly, but tough grading that provided feedback on the quality of their reflections and the rigor of their analyses sent a clear message that the assignments were to be taken seriously. The ethics assignments were graded using a rubric that evaluated student writing quality, critical thinking and analytical skills, ability to consider more than one ethical perspective, structured argumentation, and creativity.

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While many found it helpful to hear other students’ perspectives on how to approach a problem, others very clearly expressed a desire for me to present a single correct way to approach a problem, along with the answer.

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When multiple examples are presented, without the expectation that any one system is familiar, it becomes possible to strike a balance between what students know and what will expand their horizons.

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A second criticism of hooks’s pedagogy is that the teacher loses control of the classroom

when s/he adopts a classroom style (more) grounded in mutuality and respect. I have found the

exact opposite to be the case – that students were “out of control” when I used a top-down

teaching style because they weren’t taking responsibility for their own learning or for the class

dynamic. At its core, this argument is about power. Instructors have it, students don’t, and if the

goal is to empower students, instructors need to cease clinging to power for its own sake.

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Time is the single largest barrier to implementing liberative pedagogies in engineering

education (and likely in any field). It takes time and work to develop the new assignments and

new lecture material that I have described in this paper. It takes more class time for students to

teach each other how to do problems, for discussions, demonstrations, field trips, and other

events that help students connect with course material.

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Because the goals of liberative pedagogies are different, assessment should similarly be

different. In Freire’s terms, the proof is in the praxis. Successful pedagogies of liberation will

result in student reflective action. How students choose to live their lives is the ultimate evidence

of effective teaching methods. Some measures that can be taken on the time scale needed for

conventional education and built into regular course assignments include assessing student

abilities to think critically, and assessing how well students have applied course material to their

lives. Neither of these is as quantitatively assessable as knowledge measured by written exams or multiple-choice testing, but in some ways the qualitative information is more complete, especially when used in consort with more conventional knowledge or skills testing.

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Taking Responsibility for their Learning

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Taking Responsibility for their Learning

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Time in class is never spent going over the

reading, but instead on how to use the reading material in engineering analysis. They are

additionally expected to have basic library and information literacy skills, which are built into

assignments – for example, looking up data in engineering handbooks and the like.

Such expectations are disconcerting for students at first, but most adjust to the need to be resourceful and an equal partner in the learning process. A few continue to prefer the easier path of being fed knowledge from the instructor. Although there was no survey question about this course element, there was some unsolicited feedback from students in their listing of things to change about the course. 2 of 10 students asked explicitly that I spend more time presenting material in the reading. Taking responsibility for one’s own learning is the most difficult aspect

of liberative pedagogies for students to accept, but it also holds the greatest promise of reward.

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Freire’s critiques of education in Brazil strongly parallel critiques of engineering education. In what Freire terms the “banking system” of education, “knowledge is a gift

bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to

know nothing.”4 The lecture-only model, still very common in engineering education, typifies

Freire’s description.

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I challenge our community to consider seriously the goal of liberation, rather than equity.

Adopting liberation as a goal means making a commitment to work to end oppression based on

race, class, and gender, and to seek justice, not only in our classrooms, but also across the

profession and in society. Liberative pedagogies hold a great deal of promise for changing not

only engineering education, but also the nature of the profession as a whole.

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For many years, efforts toward increasing the participation of traditionally underrepresented groups in engineering have not placed sufficient emphasis on pedagogy or curriculum as avenues for reform, despite repeated calls to do so. Davis and Rosser note that when institutions undertake curricular reform, they rarely consider the gender impacts of their

efforts, let alone fully integrate curricular reform with strategies to establish gender equity. The current mindset is that improving engineering education in mainstream ways, without considering gender or race, will help all students – “the rising tide raises all boats.” Thus, reforms - such as establishing relevance of course material - are often done only from a white male perspective, and may or may not have relevance for white women and people of color.

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Liberation --> STEMM and community transformation

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Liberation --> STEMM and community transformation

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There is a big "elephant in the living room" when we teach engineering, which is that student employment opportunities typically center around military defense, or around multinational corporations, many of whom are vilified by some of our same students for their colonialist monopolies around the globe. Helping students discover what their values are, and how to live them out, is a cornerstone of education. While liberative pedagogies come from a progressive orientation, they are not meant to result in indoctrination of students; on the contrary, learning to think critically allows students to make up their own minds. Conventional engineering education, by not questioning any application of technology, creates a values vacuum in which everything is sanctioned, or nothing, so that students have no basis for decision-making.

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Pedagogies of Liberation in an Engineering Thermodynamics Class, Donna Riley.