Disrupting Engineering Education: Beyond Peace Engineering to Educating Engineers for Justice

摘要

Engineering education outcomes as prescribed by the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology comprise technical and scientific student educational outcomes as well as “soft skills”. The scientific and technical outcomes ensure that engineering graduates possess the requisite science, math, engineering and technology skills and capabilities that will enable them to practice competently in their disciplinary engineering profession with technical, scientific and engineering rigor. Soft skills, on the other hand, which are being increasingly emphasized as critically necessary for engineering graduates to be employable and successful in the professional workspace, focus on teamwork, communication, ethics, global awareness (including social, economic, environmental and global impacts of engineering), and lifelong learning. In this essay, we posit that migrating engineering education towards “peace engineering” not only requires that faculty place increased emphasis on these soft skills, but also needs the incorporation of true impact analyses – much like an Environmental Impact Assessment – on the social, environmental and economic impacts of the solutions that students develop to engineering projects and problems. This impact analysis must go beyond an assessment of those areas mentioned in the conference’s informal definition of “peace engineering”, which identifies components including “…promotion of prosperity, sustainability, social equality and diversity, culture of equality, ethics, innovation and entrepreneurship.” While these issues are critically important for promoting and supporting an ethos of peace engineering, we suggest that they will have minimal impact unless the thinking and analyses extends to focus onjustice, extending the justice paradigm from civil, social and environmental justice to include energy justice, resource justice, information justice and technology justice. Exposing engineering students to these concepts and ideas and incorporating the notion of justice into the impacts of technology research, development and implementation will move us from a “war” based socio-technological configuration to a global peace engineering agenda that might actually move us towards engineers educated to transform their world for peace and justice.