Enhancing Decision-Making in Engineering Education: Utilizing Appropriate Technology to Integrate Technical and Social Considerations

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 1:15 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Decision Making, Problem Solving, and Career Development in Engineering (Table 34)

Abstract

This study addresses the need to prepare engineering students with a critical approach that promotes sociotechnical approaches to engineering problem-solving while disrupting technocratic solutions. Through Appropriate Technology and engineering design, we report a qualitative instrumental case study on the arguments of a team of engineering students collaborating in a decision-making activity to select the most appropriate technologies for supplying water to households in las colonias. Students moved from a “naive” perception of technology to more complex analytical perspectives where the social, political, cultural, and environmental aspects supported the engineering decision-making. By adopting a sociotechnical lens students can break cycles of perpetuating an ideology of engineering as a technocratic field to develop more inclusive ways of knowing, doing and being engineers.

Authors

• Luis E. Montero Moguel, University of Texas - San Antonio

• Joel Alejandro Mejia, University of Cincinnati

• Guadalupe Carmona, University of Texas - San Antonio