Engineering Accountability in the Extractive Industries: From Classrooms to Corporations

• In Event: Sustainability & Transformation in Engineering Education - I: Overcoming Disjunctures in the Cultivation of Professional Skill Sets

Abstract

This paper explores how engineers who practice in the extractive industries learn about social responsibility and practices of accountability. Drawing on interviews with more than 75 engineers, I trace the mismatch they reported between the broader corporate social responsibility (CSR) dimensions of their professional work and their undergraduate engineering training, which separated out and focused on its technical dimensions while requiring liberal arts courses that they struggled to make relevant to the dilemmas they faced. This resulted in many expressing frustration that their first exposure to questions of community acceptance happened on the job in “trial by fire” situations. I then describe ongoing efforts by engineering educators to provide spaces for that learning to happen inside of students’ undergraduate experiences, including my teaching and program development at the Colorado School of Mines that emerged from the ethnographic learning described throughout the preceding chapters. Research on student learning in these contexts points to the challenges and opportunities of using a critical take on CSR and engineering to make visible and attempt to blur a pervasive social/technical dualism that informs many of students’ learning experiences.

Author

• Jessica Mary Smith, Colorado School of Mines