Integrating an engineering justice approach in an undergraduate engineering mechanics course

This research-to-practice WIP paper describes the design and creation of instructional materials grounded in the engineering justice approach, as described by Leydens and Lucena, in a 16-week engineering mechanics course - statics and dynamics. The instructional materials were designed as two successive 8-week long, project-based learning (PBL) units centered around fictitious scenarios in real-world settings. The first PBL unit focused on a truss bridge project with deliverables structured around the human-centered design (HCD) process, and the second PBL unit focused on an amusement park project with deliverables structured around an engineering for social justice (ESJ) approach. Both PBL units were designed as illstructured problems and tasked teams of students to weigh competing factors relating to economic, environmental, and sociocultural impacts to each community in order to justify a final engineering recommendation. In each PBL unit, guided reflection prompts recorded individual student attitudes and beliefs about the appropriateness in using the HCD process and ESJ approach to meet the needs of each community. The focus of this paper is on the instructional design strategy and preliminary analysis of the qualitative data. Our early observations suggest that students perceived value in the engineering for social justice approach, and they identified specific community needs rooted in economic, environmental, and sociocultural dimensions. Yet, many students struggled to connect those community needs to their engineering project efforts. This early interpretation suggests that it is viable to use the ESJ approach in an introductory engineering mechanics course to raise student awareness around social justice issues.