Engineering and Humanities Intersections

Integrating pedagogies from the humanities into engineering curricula can help students communicate, collaborate and situate their technical learning in broader social and cultural contexts, supporting their success as future professionals working in complex sociotechnical environments. There is a large body of literature that argues for such an interdisciplinary, liberal arts education, providing reasons to believe that transdisciplinary competencies improve a student’s problem-solving readiness, promote an ethical mindset and encourage the inclusion of multiple perspectives and epistemologies. However, these arguments for integration are often theoretical or aspirational, supported by minimal in-depth qualitative research into how specific outcomes are achieved by these experiences. My dissertation project addresses this shortcoming by studying the experience of engineering students working with pedagogical tools from Theatre & Performance Studies, exploiting my position as an educator and researcher at the intersection of these fields. My project analyzes three sites: a theatre course for engineering students, a science communication course for Engineering students that uses the tools of performance analysis, and a student-led theatre revue. I adopted a grounded theory approach to collect and analyze site observations, semi-structured interviews, course materials and student work at these intersections. This analysis was guided by three questions: 1. How might interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches to engineering education such as those from Theatre and Performance Studies disrupt or challenge engineering epistemologies and student mindsets?2. What can such disruptive pedagogical approaches reveal about the relationship between classroom environment—both physical and in terms of community—and student learning? 3. How do students understand the impact of those approaches, especially as it pertains to their futures in engineering? Adopting a narrative inquiry approach to my data, my analyses explore affordances and enabling pedagogies from across the three sites. By grounding the analysis in this qualitative data, my study moves beyond the conventionally cited “benefits” of interdisciplinary learning in the field, such as greater communication or collaboration skills, to identify some new important thematic concerns: building community, promoting contingency and relativism, ethical practice, and opportunities for professional and personal reflection.

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