Contemplating Engineering and Science: Creating Compassionate and Empathetic Learning Spaces in Engineering Education

This Work-in-Progress Innovative Practice paper introduces contemplative practices as a way of creating compassionate and empathetic learning spaces in engineering education. Contemplation refers to thoughtful observation, reflection, consideration, or intention, sometimes associated with deeper awareness and sense of presence. As such, contemplative practices – both individual and communal, internal, and external – allow for an emergence of deeper meaning of self and the world through the development of compassion, empathy, connectedness, and creativity. Newly emerging in higher education, contemplative pedagogies bring students’ authentic selves into the learning process, fostering a personal and collective sense of belonging, inclusion, and engagement of all student’s diverse ways of knowing and being. This is particularly important in today’s engineering education where the disinclination to include diverse students’ senses of self as they uncompassionately learn to build the technology of the future is harmful for that same future they attempt to build. This paper presents an Innovative Practice that brings together a plethora of contemplative pedagogies in two undergraduate engineering courses – a Physics Foundation and an intermediate-level Social Science courses. To assess the effectiveness of this innovation, we use students’ weekly reflective assignments that demonstrate an emerging sense of trust and belonging. We also find that contemplative pedagogies create a scaffolding for students’ development of compassion, self-compassion, and empathy – educational outcomes that are otherwise absent in their engineering education. Students report a sense of palpable personal growth and self-discovery as well as an opportunity to reexamine science and engineering through the lenses of their diverse ways of knowing and being. Many reflect on a sense of integration of one’s sense of self into an otherwise sterile engineering education devoid of subjective, caring, and heart.