Exploring Critical Consciousness in Engineering Curriculum Through an Ill-Structured Problem

This research-to-practice work-in-progress paper presents the preliminary effort to explore and actualize the third tenet of Ladson-Billing's theory of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) into a required, sophomore-level engineering statics and dynamics course. The third tenet is focused on bettering students' sense of critical consciousness, whereby critical consciousness is defined as a person's awareness of their social context and their ability to advocate against injustices within their social context. Specifically, this paper focuses on exploring students' changing awareness to their cultural, environmental, social, and political context in response to an ill-structured problem. This approach aims to challenge students to question the status-quo within engineering curriculum and practice, and it aims to equip them with vocabulary and tools to identify and challenge visible and invisible exclusionary barriers in their own present-day (curriculum) and future (practice) lives. If actualized within engineering curriculum, then such educational approaches could arm future engineering practitioners with the skillset and mindset needed to disarm exclusionary barriers that pervade engineering practice. The results of this limited study generated mixed results, indicating a need to continue exploring means of effectively fostering critical consciousness using ill-structured problems.