Article
An Emancipatory Teaching Practice in a Technical Course: A Layered Account of Designing Circuits Laboratory Instructions for a Diversity of Learners Title
Proceedings of the 2020 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
(2020)
Abstract
This paper is about the liberal education goal of emancipation in the domain of thought. Specifically, liberal education’s aim is “to achieve freedom from self-imposed constraints, reified social forces and institutions, and conditions of distorted communication” (Ewert, 1991, p. 354.) As middle-aged female engineering faculty, the authors recognize that our enculturation in engineering and science has “bound” our thinking to conform to masculine norms. Through a classroom intervention intended to serve a diversity of learners, the authors have uncovered a liberational pathway for engineering faculty and students. The pathway involved caring for students through linguistic, epistemic and aesthetic shifts in the existing laboratory documentation for first year engineering students. These actions transcend what are normally hidden engineering and science education values and norms; they are in the “invisible” causal domains of intent, and design. In this quasi-autoethnography, we unpack themes from student focus groups that illustrate that the interventions served to disrupt the distorted messages that learners normally receive about themselves from traditional engineering and science education settings. Our reflections on our (i.e., the Authors’) own learning journeys, along with our descriptions of the interventions and analyses of focus group reflections provide a rich picture of a liberational pathway for engineering and science educators who desire a liberal education. This path liberates engineering faculty and student alike while not sacrificing the technical content.
Keywords
- emancipatory education,
- laboratory,
- implicit bias,
- diversity
Disciplines
Publication Date
2020
DOI
https://peer.asee.org/34113
Citation Information
Vanasupa, L., & Schlemer, L. T., & Zastavker, Y. V. (2020, June), An Emancipatory Teaching Practice in a Technical Course: A Layered Account of Designing Circuits Laboratory Instructions for a Diversity of Learners Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34113
Creative Commons license
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY-ND International License.