I'm so pleased to be able to share a project that Kirsten Davis, James (Jamie) Davis, Dr. Jessica Deters, Homero Murzi, Ph.D., and I just published in the European Journal of Engineering Education.
Our paper, Fostering systems thinking through engineering study abroad programs, explores how students reflect on sociotechnical systems during two engineering-focused study abroad programs. One group visited the UK and Ireland, while the other traveled to China. Without specific prompting, students reflected on technical aspects (as defined by Grohs et al., 2019) as well as economic, social, political, and cultural dimensions. These reflections demonstrate how students interpret and engage with complex systems they observe and participate in.
Here's a quick excerpt from a student who reflected on their experience growing up in the U.S. Rust Belt and their experiences in an automated Chinese steel mill.
"The mill was efficient and mostly automated: few workers were needed to operate the enormous machines. This was particularly of interest to me, a student from the Midwest/Rust Belt from Pittsburgh. I grew up in the shadows of closed-down steel plants and poor communities that once relied on the steel jobs that had gone off to China. Now I was standing right here. Here were the jobs – but there weren’t that many of them. In the area that I am from, ignoring some of his other ideas because they aren’t entirely relevant here, Trump’s isolationist trade ideas are almost unanimously popular. It was very interesting for me to come to China and see the steel industry here and observe the realities of what is happening: wherever the steel is produced in these modern times, it will never be factories full of thousands of workers like my community used to know. It will be many machines and a few dozen workers, wherever those few may be from." [China 45]
This reflection highlights how engineering students connected their lived experiences to the sociopolitical and technical systems they encountered abroad. Our paper suggests strategies for building on these insights in study abroad programs and other experiential learning contexts.
This project was a labor of love, spanning job transitions, the completion of a dissertation, and the pandemic. I’m deeply grateful to have worked with such an incredible team on a topic close to all our hearts.
We splurged for open access, so please feel free to explore our work here:
https://lnkd.in/exfGiEJr
