'Simple Service Simply Given': Systems Theory and Systems Thinking in Canadian Engineering Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Central to questions about engineering practices are questions about engineering education. Confronting uncertain futures of socio-technological changes, engineers reform their education programs to stimulate competencies in pupils who, they hope, will be up for the challenges ahead. Despite a critical focus on technoscientific practices within science and technology studies, scholarship has given little attention to critical perspectives on education. This dissertation offers a comparative ethnographic study of engineering education reforms, examining education policy formations and educational practices. I study these reforms through two organizations: Engineers Canada and the Engineering Change Lab. I collected historical data from Engineers Canada’s archive (1936–2012) on engineering education curricular and policy reforms. I collected ethnographic data from the Engineering Change Lab (2017–2019) on contemporary educational practices. Throughout, I compare developments of the Canadian engineering education system and its couplings with Canadian nationalisms, gender hierarchies, and technoscientific change. I narrate how: 1. Nationalisms guide the structuring of Canadian engineering education sustaining a settler colonial Canada, resisted through the inclusion of Indigenous peoples and practices. 2. Gender hierarchies guide Canadian engineering fostering a men-dominated industry where efforts to continually improve women’s low representation meet some successes. 3. “Technoscientific change” gives meaning to engineering through promises of technoscientific progress and anxieties of technological change. Considering the tensions between engineering education and engineering practices documented in this research, I use Luhmann’s systems theory to examine a contradiction: engineering education is considered weakly connected with engineering practices while being leveraged as a perennial solution to problems in engineering practices. As such, engineering is a reactive discipline, one fundamentally incapable of securing its desired stability through a focus on potentialities over actualities. Occupying such a role destines one to a sense of insecurity that the present is never enough. This dissertation advances science and technology studies by critically examining engineering education as engineering practices and the relevant sociopolitical dimensions at play, and by demonstrating nuanced approaches to understanding technoscientific education through ethnography. I argue for the utility of Luhmann’s systems theory in engineering education, specifying a language with educative appeal for engineers who direct their “system” of engineering education.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".