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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.