LEES 2024 Conference Wrap-up

Thank you all for your support in making the annual ASEE conference in Portland run smoothly and be filled with great scholarship, conversation, and fellowship. What an honor it has been to serve as your program chair.

A huge thanks to our authors of 41 papers and posters; organizers and facilitators of our seven special sessions; the moderators who navigated difficult conversations and kept presenters to their time; and our amazing reviewers for providing feedback that helped our scholars hone and polish their work.

A major highlight of the LEES program was our distinguished lecture given by Brooke Coley, co-sponsored with ECSJ/EQUITY. Dr. Coley encouraged the audience to engineer and educate with love, drawing from the work of Ruha Benjamin and bell hooks. It was a wonderful continuation of dialogue promoted by last year’s topical plenary and a nuanced introduction to Coley’s CCRRKT framework.

Many thanks to local community members and organizers who spoke to us about labor and engineering and to Joey Valle and Bailey Bond-Trittipo for their panel organization and facilitation. Our teaching sociotechnical case studies was a hit, bringing together LEES members to share their teaching practices and brainstorm ideas for continued, collective engagement with our pedagogy at the annual conference. We also heard from past winners of the Sterling Olmsted Award about how they’ve seen LEES change throughout their careers, how we could collaborate with other liberal arts education efforts around the country, and ways to think about the LEES “canon,” “cocktail recipe,” and/or other framings for productively building off previous, influential scholarship while expanding our community.

Congratulations to our best paper authors, Amy E. Slaton and Sepehr Vakil, for their piece entitled, “Engineering Education in Times of War, Upheaval and Revolution;” and to our best DEI-related paper, “Why would you ask me about engineering culture and belonging? Introducing social science prompts into engineering surveys” by Cindy Rottmann, Dimpho Radebe, Emily Moore, Andrea Chan, Emily Macdonald-Roach, Saskia van Beers, and Sasha-Ann Eleanor Nixon. We also awarded an honorable mention paper, “Countering Passive Engagement: STS Postures and Analyzing Student Agency in Everyday Engineering” by David Tomblin, Nicole Farkas Mogul, and Christin J. Salley which was presented by Timothy Duane Reedy. Olga Pierrakos received the Sterling Olmsted Award.

This year marked our third annual cross-divisional social with partnering divisions ECSJ/EQUITY, CED, ETHICS, and INES. Many thanks to our sponsors, Mechanical Engineering at University of Colorado Boulder, the Lafayette College Engineering Division, and the Humanitarian Engineering program at Colorado School of Mines. Full of gratitude for our previous sponsors, it is worth sharing that the social is becoming more difficult to sustain financially, and we always welcome potential sponsors and/or ideas for fundraising.

Thanks to Division Chair Jenn Stroud Rossmann for her fearless leadership (including, but not limited to, superb documentation and templating), Megan Kenny Feister for her communications and outreach efforts, Desen Özkan for serving as treasurer during another difficult financial year, and Janet Tsai for her work as CDEI liaison.

I am thrilled to pass the program-chair-baton to Kari Zacharias for the 2025 ASEE meeting in Montréal, Québec and that Desen Özkan has transitioned from treasurer to program-chair elect. Gratitude is due to our three new members of leadership, Jenna Tonn (Boston College), Rich House (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology), and Aubrey Wigner (Colorado School of Mines) who have been elected to serve in the roles of LEES treasurer, communications officer, and a newly formed position, local coordination lead, respectively. Thanks, ahead of time, for your service to LEES.

Please contact Desen Özkan (desen.ozkan@uconn.edu) and Aubrey Wigner (awigner@mines.edu) if you have any ideas for Montréal-specific programming as we’d like to start working with potential in-person partners as soon as possible.

As always, thanks so much for being a part of this community.

All the best,

Marie

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society (LEES) Division Call for Papers and Proposals

The Liberal Education/Engineering & Society (LEES) Division invites abstracts for papers and posters, and proposals for full sessions, panel discussions, workshops, and non-traditional session formats for the ASEE Annual Conference, June 23 – 26, 2024 in Portland, Oregon. We especially welcome sessions that highlight local collaborators and engineering practice and engagement in and around Portland and/or reimagine the traditional conference paper-session. If you would like to propose a non-paper or poster centered session of any kind, please email the LEES Program Chair, Marie Stettler Kleine, at mkleine@mines.edu as early as possible. We would be excited to work with you on proposing, reviewing, and potentially planning these sessions. 

LEES is interested in the role of the humanities, arts, social sciences, and communication in engineering education, and in the role of engineering in broad and relevant liberal education. LEES welcomes proposals related to any of the diverse areas falling within the scope of our division, including but not limited to: critical analysis of social and ethical dimensions of technoscience; situation of engineering within larger social, historical, political, and cultural contexts; course- and curricular-level integration of engineering and the humanities, arts, and social sciences; and development, study, and transformation of engineering education programs. Engineering processes and products are value-laden; work in LEES calls attention to implicit and explicit values in engineering education.

LEES welcomes papers on any topic pertaining to the broader division goals. For the 2024 conference, we especially encourage papers pertaining to the following specific themes. 

1. 1. Liberatory Engineering Education / Centering Justice in Engineering Education: We seek work that advances values of justice in engineering education: anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia; social, economic, and environmental justice (Riley et. al, 2009; Riley & Claris, 2009; Holly 2020; Nieusma, 2013). Efforts centering justice and liberation are distinct from conservative/assimilationist structures that maintain the status quo (Slaton, 2015; Koh & Rossmann, 2021). Work in this area may be concerned with the implications of prevailing framings of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ for education research and practice. Explorations of practicing and theorizing for community organizing, activism, reflection, dialogue, and conscientization (cf. Paolo Freire, bell hooks) are encouraged, as is work that connects justice- and liberation-centered engineering education to its local contexts. We are interested in papers and in a variety of other formats, including workshops, activities, local partnerships, and virtual engagements.
   2. Exploring the relationship between Engineering and Labor: We invite papers that focus on the engineering profession and how engineers view themselves as laborers (Meiksins & Smith, 1993). Work focusing on how engineers engage in community and labor organizing is especially welcomed (Valle, Bowen, & Riley, 2021). Cases which highlight how engineering education could better prepare graduates for the workplace and their potential for influencing systemic change would augment LEES programming and help connect its past content to future initiatives. Exploring relationships between engineers and other laborers, including technicians and manufacturers, supplements and complicates the idea of “workforce preparedness,” and builds our understanding of the geopolitical complexity of technical expertise in industries including energy, semiconductors, and shipping. Through this theme, we ask, how does and does not engineering education prepare engineers to participate in complicated labor relationships?
   3. Personal and Institutional Experiences with Integrating Liberal Arts and Engineering: LEES leads efforts to critique and dissolve the artificial boundaries between “social” and “technical” to show that engineering is always a sociotechnical endeavor. LEES work holds engineers accountable for understanding how to bridge the socio-technical “divide,” and minimizing discriminatory disciplinary chauvinism (Reddy, et. al, 2023; Bairaktarova & Pilotte, 2020; Smith & Smith, 2018; Carrigan & Bardini, 2021). We especially welcome sessions that  recognize, analyze, and otherwise work with a “generative tension” among LEES participants, a group that serves as a venue for engineering educators grounded in science and technology studies and/or engineering studies and also makes space for liberal arts education program building which includes promoting the importance of communication and professional skills, etc (Nieusma, 2015). Please also consider building collaborations across ASEE divisions that might support our scholarship and capacity building. Several LEES members noted strong overlaps with, among others: Ethics, Equity, Culture & Social Justice in Education, and  Technological and Engineering Literacy/Philosophy of Engineering Divisions.
   4. The Future of Engineering Education: Building on the themes above, and the annual conference theme of “The Future of Engineering Education,” we encourage papers that reflect on critical histories of engineering education and its relationship to labor, geopolitics, and policy making with an eye towards the future (Mitcham, 2022; Sharma, 2016; Wisnioski, 2015). We welcome work that asks how LEES scholarship has, does, and could inform future visions and enactments of engineering education and practice (Tomblin & Mogul, 2020; Pawley, 2019)?

The first step is submission of abstracts for papers, workshops, panels, and special session requests by November 1, 2023. Abstracts should be approximately 300-500 words long and will be peer reviewed. We encourage “nontraditional” papers and panels, and we will work to incorporate these into the peer review system with appropriately chosen reviewers, designate them as special sessions, or otherwise find a strategy of inclusion for the eventual conference. Again, email Marie Stettler Kleine (mkleine@mines.edu) to initiate that process. LEES sessions are designed to foster discussion among authors, often functioning like panel discussions of common themes and relevant issues. We have a wealth of incredible work developed by our own members across a spectrum of platforms, some of which can be accessed through conference proceedings and the LEES website. 

ASEE is adamant that they will not extend any deadlines this year because they are trying to adapt a standard, annual calendar. Information for Authors will be posted by ASEE regarding submission times and uploading instructions. All paper submissions are publish-to-present and will be peer reviewed by the LEES Division process after submission to ASEE’s paper management system. Abstracts and papers are double-blind reviewed.  It is the author’s responsibility to ensure that the requirements for double-blind review are met.  The abstract and subsequent drafts should NOT include authors’ names or institutional affiliations nor should author names be in the file name or in document properties.  It is not necessary to include references in the abstract. Additional information will be shared to the listserv for current members and the LEES website as the year progresses.

To share ideas for panels/workshops or any questions about possible papers, panels, co-sponsoring with other divisions or other special session concepts, or to express interest in serving as a peer reviewer or session moderator,  please contact the program chair:

Marie Stettler Kleine, Assistant Professor, Department of Engineering, Design, & Society, Colorado School of Mines

mkleine@mines.edu

 

References

Bairaktarova, D., & Pilotte, M. K. (2020). Person or thing oriented: A comparative study of individual differences of first‐year engineering students and practitioners. Journal of Engineering Education, 109(2), 230–242. https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20309

Carrigan, C., & Bardini, M. (2021). Majorism: Neoliberalism in student culture. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 52(1), 42–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/aeq.12361

Holly, J. J. (2020). Disentangling engineering education research’s anti‐Blackness. Journal of Engineering Education, 109(4), 629–635. https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20364

Koh, R., & Rossmann, J. S. (2021, July). Strategic Disruptions Toward a More Liberatory Engineering Education Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. https://peer.asee.org/37733

Meiksins, P., & Smith, C. (1993). Why American engineers aren’t unionized: A comparative perspective. Theory and Society, 22(1), 57–97. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00993448

Nieusma, D. (2013). Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace: Strategies for Educational and Professional reform. In Philosophy of engineering and technology (pp. 19–40). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6350-0_2

Nieusma, D. (2015). Conducting the instrumentalists: a framework for engineering liberal education. Engineering Studies, 7(2–3), 159–163. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2015.1085060

Pawley, A. L. (2019). “Asking questions, we walk”: How should engineering education address equity, the climate crisis, and its own moral infrastructure? Journal of Engineering Education, 108(4), 447–452. https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20295

Reddy, E. A., & Kleine, M. S., & Parsons, M., & Nieusma, D. (2023, June), Sociotechnical Integration: What Is It? Why Do We Need It? How Do We Do It? Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. https://peer.asee.org/44239

Riley, D. & Claris, L. (2009), From Persistence to Resistance: Pedagogies of Liberation for Inclusive Science and Engineering. International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, 1(1),, http://genderandset.open.ac.uk/index.php/genderandset/article/view/25.

Riley, D., Pawley, A., Tucker, J., Catalano, G. (2009). Feminisms in Engineering Education: Transformative Possibilities. NWSA Journal 21, no. 2: 21–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20628172.

Slaton, A. E. (2015). Meritocracy, Technocracy, Democracy: Understandings of racial and gender equity in American engineering education. In Philosophy of engineering and technology (pp. 171–189). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16169-3_8

Smith, J. M., & Smith, N. (2018). Engineering and the politics of commensuration in the mining and petroleum industries. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 4, 67–84. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2018.211

Tomblin, D., & Mogul, N. (2020). STS Postures: responsible innovation and research in undergraduate STEM education. Journal of Responsible Innovation, 7(sup1), 117–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/23299460.2020.1839230

Wisnioski, M. (2015). What’s the use? History and engineering education research. Journal of Engineering Education. https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20075

Valle, J., & Bowen, C. L., & Riley, D. M. (2021, July), Liberatory Potential of Labor Organizing in Engineering Education Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. https://peer.asee.org/37459