scholarly journals Incorporation of liberal education into the engineering curriculum at a polytechnic

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Devin R. Berg ◽  
Tina Lee
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Service Learning ◽  
General Education ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
Engineering Curriculum ◽  
Engineering Programs ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
Ethical Frameworks ◽  
Professional Careers ◽  
High Level

Traditional engineering education often falls short when it comes to the inclusion of issues related to social justice, ethics, and globalization. While engineering programs are required to include ethics content for accreditation, most seem to rely primarily on general education electives, providing only a high-level overview and including the bare minimum in the program core. This can lead to an inconsistent student experience and minimal exposure to topics which are critically important for achieving worldwide equity and operating responsibly in the engineering workplace. Given the role that engineers play in economic development, this is unacceptable. It is therefore the responsibility of engineering educators to find a better way to shape the future of the engineering profession. This paper outlines the early efforts at integrating the topics of ethics, social justice, and social responsibility more directly into the engineering curriculum. This is approached from the perspectives of pedagogy, curriculum development, and service learning opportunities. It is within this context that the authors hope to influence students' awareness of and connection to social and environmental issues as well as the ethical frameworks they develop and carry with them into their professional careers. This paper centers around the creation and delivery of a new introductory engineering course combining liberal education topics and introductory engineering topics. This course also includes a substantial design project which incorporates a cultural engagement component through collaboration with international partners. The first offering of this new course revealed that, while some reservations persist, students found value in exploring what it means to be an engineer in a broader global context.

A Grand Challenge

2018 ◽  
pp. 429-444
Author(s):  
Adam Moore ◽  
Susan Trostle Brand
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Service Learning ◽  
General Education ◽  
Teacher Candidates ◽  
Teacher Educators ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Grand Challenge ◽  
Service Learning Projects ◽  
Learning Projects ◽  
Structure And Design

Teacher educators committed to social justice are charged with preparing future professionals with the knowledge and skills characteristic of change agents. This chapter explains how two university faculty members co-taught a general education course about education and social justice enlisting service-learning. This multidisciplinary course allowed teacher candidates to work with peers from other majors to select, plan, and implement a service-learning project. The structure and design of the course is described, along with examples of readings, film, media, and organizations that promote social justice. Qualitative reflections from former students are included, along with descriptions of service-learning projects. Recommendations and implications for teacher educators designing a similar course are provided.

The Reinvention of Scottish Liberal Education: Secondary Schooling, 1900–39

2011 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsay Paterson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Secondary Schools ◽  
General Education ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
Undergraduate Curriculum ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Secondary Schooling ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Professional Careers ◽  
Secondary Sector

Scottish secondary education was radically extended in size and social reach in the first four decades of the twentieth century, bringing significant new opportunities in secondary schooling to girls, to children of the lower-middle and upper-working classes, and to Catholics. Most of the new secondary schools were based on those parish schools that had in the nineteenth century sent a few boys directly to university, and so this new secondary sector was a modernising of the mythological tradition of the lad o' pairts. The main reason it succeeded was that it sought to extend to new social groups the benefits of the version of liberal education that had come to be regarded as the foundation of professional careers. Thus the reforms also had the effect of transferring to the senior years of the secondary schools the old undergraduate curriculum that had been replaced by more specialist university courses in the late-nineteenth century. The paper offers an evidence-based critique not only of that strand of pessimism which has claimed that Scottish education was stagnant between the wars, but also of George Davie's influential view that the tradition of a broad general education was lost.

scholarly journals Impacts of Engineering Justice Curriculum: A Survey of Student Attitudes

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Lee ◽  
Elizabeth Buchanan ◽  
Devin R. Berg
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Service Learning ◽  
Social Responsibility ◽  
General Education ◽  
Student Attitudes ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Societal Implications ◽  
Engineering Practice ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages

As part of a larger project examining the role of humanitarian service learning in engineering (NSF project number EEC-1540301), we conducted an investigation of first-year engineering students' perceptions of humanitarian service learning projects, social responsibility in their discipline, and ethics in STEM. Students (n=231) taking a required freshmen level engineering course were surveyed with a pre- and post-instrument, and provided with these working definitions: * Community Service is voluntary work intended to help people in a particular community. * Social Responsibility is an obligation that an individual (or company) has to act with concern and sensitivity, aware of the impacts of their own action on others, particularly the disadvantaged. * Social Justice relates to the distribution of the advantages and disadvantages in society, including the way in which they are allocated. * Pro bono- work done without compensation (pay) for the public good. This course specifically addresses the issues described above with the goal of providing early exposure to topics that will be reinforced in non-major coursework, such as general education elective courses. Results showed that there was little change in student perceptions before and after completion of the course in terms of their perceptions of ethics, social responsibility, and social justice. In the areas in which there were statistically significant changes, students were, on average, slightly less sure the engineering profession can help people or solve social issues and slightly less interested in a job that involves helping people. On the other hand, students were slightly more aware, after the course, of the need to include social aspects in engineering practice and rated technical and professional skills as slightly less important after the class. It was also found that some groups in the class (women, minority students, first-generation students, and student less focused on salary in thinking about their future jobs) entered the class with different attitudes and changed in different ways by the end of the course. Overall, the results of this survey support other findings in engineering ethics which suggests that one course is insufficient to make significant impacts on the ways engineering students think about the societal implications of their work. However, these declines in student confidence, while small, are important to take seriously and this paper will draw out potential implications of this finding. Finally, we will discuss the implications of the differences within the class in terms of effective teaching of these topics and retention of underrepresented students.

A Grand Challenge

2021 ◽  
pp. 122-137
Author(s):  
Adam Moore ◽  
Susan Trostle Brand
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Service Learning ◽  
General Education ◽  
Teacher Candidates ◽  
Teacher Educators ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Grand Challenge ◽  
Service Learning Projects ◽  
Learning Projects ◽  
Structure And Design

Teacher educators committed to social justice are charged with preparing future professionals with the knowledge and skills characteristic of change agents. This chapter explains how two university faculty members co-taught a general education course about education and social justice enlisting service-learning. This multidisciplinary course allowed teacher candidates to work with peers from other majors to select, plan, and implement a service-learning project. The structure and design of the course is described, along with examples of readings, film, media, and organizations that promote social justice. Qualitative reflections from former students are included, along with descriptions of service-learning projects. Recommendations and implications for teacher educators designing a similar course are provided.

Diverse Applications of Sociological Imagination: A Qualitative Study of Service-Learning Mentoring

2021 ◽  
pp. 193672442110213
Author(s):  
Laura C. Atkins ◽  
Shelley B. Grant
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Service Learning ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
At Risk Youth ◽  
Reflection Data ◽  
Student Mentors ◽  
Diverse Backgrounds ◽  
Personal Histories ◽  
Media And Crime

This project expands discussions regarding critical ways that students’ diverse backgrounds and experiences intertwine with service-learning and social justice. Educators need to empower the next generation to explore their views, apply their skills, and engage with social issues. The research intersects with complex conversations about students’ perspectives regarding media representations, justice system responses, and views of at-risk youth. The project spanned four semesters of a sociology of media and crime course with service-learning mentoring. Qualitative reflection data drawn from 104 participating student mentors provided insights into how service-learners’ unique personal histories and sociological imaginations inform their views of youth, the mentoring experience, and social justice. The findings focus attention upon diversity within classrooms and expand the conversation about social justice praxis and service-learning pedagogy. Through reflexivity, the researchers consider their own social justice and service-learning practices, and add to the call for greater reflexivity within community-engaged sociology classrooms.

scholarly journals Social justice and provision for children with additional support needs in Scotland

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Riddell ◽  
Elisabet Weedon
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Educational Outcomes ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Support Needs ◽  
Class Inequality ◽  
Scottish Parliament ◽  
Family Case ◽  
Social Class Inequality ◽  
Additional Support ◽  
High Level

Since the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, successive administrations have reaffirmed their commitment to social justice. However, despite high-level equality policies, social-class inequality is a major feature of Scottish society, affecting all social policy domains, including education. In this article, we provide a brief overview of the development of support for children with learning difficulties and disabilities within the context of Scottish comprehensive schooling. We then consider the way in which ideas of social justice are reflected in education for learners with additional support needs, whose numbers have expanded over recent years and who are particularly likely to live in the most deprived parts of Scotland. Using family case studies, we explore the experiences of families from different social backgrounds, whose children have been identified as having additional support needs. The data suggest that children living in deprived areas experience cumulative disadvantage, attracting stigmatising labels without the benefit of extra resources necessary to improve educational outcomes. By way of contrast, those from more advantaged areas are generally more successful in avoiding stigmatising labels while ensuring that facilitating resources are in place. Findings are discussed within Fraser’s three-dimensional framework of social justice, encompassing distribution, recognition and representation.

Educating for Equity and Social Justice: A Conceptual Model for Cultural Engagement

2007 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah J. Hess ◽  
Hilreth Lanig ◽  
Winston Vaughan
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Conceptual Model ◽  
Cultural Engagement

On Understanding Everything: General Education, Liberal Education, and the Study of Religion

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (2) ◽  
pp. 460-466
Author(s):  
Amy Hollywood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
General Education ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
Preliminary Report ◽  
Task Force ◽  
Oral Communication ◽  
The United States ◽  
Final Report ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
Reason And Faith

In October 2006, the Harvard University task force on general education issued a preliminary report describing and justifying a new program of general education for Harvard College. Contending that “[g]eneral education is the public face of liberal education,” the task force enumerated what a person liberally educated in the twenty-first-century United States should know—or, perhaps better, know how to think about in reasoned and nuanced ways (Preliminary Report 3). The report called for seven semester-long courses in “five broad areas of inquiry and experience”: Cultural Traditions and Cultural Change, The Ethical Life, The United States and the World, Reason and Faith, and Science and Technology. In addition, the task force suggested that students be required to take three semester-long courses that “develop critical skills”: writing and oral communication, foreign language, and analytic reasoning (6). Not surprisingly, “Reason and Faith” generated some of the most heated discussion—and it was the first suggested requirement dropped by the task force, replaced in December 2006 by a new category, “What It Means to Be a Human Being.” By the time of the final report, this too was gone, replaced by “Culture and Belief,” an area of inquiry that may include the study of religion but is broader in scope than what was initially proposed (Report of the Task Force 11–12).

LIFELONG LEARNING IN RESTAURANT BUSINESS

2007 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-114
Author(s):  
Gabriela Rakicevik ◽  
Sofronija Miladinoski ◽  
Jagoda Strezoska
Keyword(s):  
Service Learning ◽  
Lifelong Learning ◽  
Computer Training ◽  
Role Playing ◽  
Tourism Industry ◽  
Service Industries ◽  
Group Training ◽  
Role Playing Games ◽  
Lecture Demonstration ◽  
High Level

Lifelong learning is the reality in all successful service industries. In the field of the hotel and tourism industry, it is very important to implement this concept. That will assure to achieve high level of quality - to be competitive on the market, and as feedback to get a big number of satisfied guests. There are different issues to discuss for the concept of lifelong learning. One of the most important thing is the need and interest for permanent education from both sides: employee and employer. The other issue is: according to law who is competent to organize and offer different forms of lifelong learning; who will recognize the certificate and/or diploma!? Financial aspect has big influence as well: who will cover the expences for any kind of education for already employed people. Methods and techniques for lifelong learning varry according to target group, topic, time, department in the hospitality property etc. Training is very popular method for permanent education. In general there are two basic types of training: the one-on-one training method and group training. Much of the training in restaurant business is done individually. Most one-on-one training is conducted by implementation of the following techniques: buddy system, cross-training,computer training and video. There are many different techniques that can be used in group training: classroom, lecture, demonstration, role-playing, games, professional trainers. In some countries, very popular is the concept of service learning.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document