Conclusion
The Lafayette Community gives the highest regard to its engineering programs and the ways in which it produces high-achieving, competent graduates and attracts further prospective students. The Bachelors of Science (B.S.) Programs in Mechanical, Civil & Environmental, Electrical, and Chemical engineering all prepare students to enter the workforce and provide the tools for numerous technical challenges they might encounter throughout their careers. While Lafayette as a school values a multidisciplinary education by requiring engineering students to also fulfill humanities requirements–as we have discussed throughout this project–the lack of integration between engineering classes and topics of racism and technology leaves Lafayette engineering students unprepared to combat systemic racism within technical fields. Even within the Engineering Studies Major, a program that by its own definition is intended to prepare students to address complex social issues in relation to their intersections with engineering, the nature and history of engineering in the context of race and white supremacy ingrained in engineering development is not discussed until this programs capstone course. Students are already preconceived about this lack of bias awareness by the time they have entered their senior year. This is reflected on an even greater scale across the engineering department as many students have no understanding of how their work and future careers shape the societies and communities they live in. With the recent rise in the cultural consciousness on systemic racism and white supremacy from the Black Lives Matter movement, it seems odd that a school that prides itself on its programs for diversity and inclusion has not made efforts to be at the forefront of socio-technical education. The tools for self-reflection earned from the integration of racial justice lessons into daily classes could offer students invaluable skills to combat racial injustices within their field as well as previous notions of technological determinism within their communities.
Building a Framework
Throughout our process, our goal was to work with already existing resources at Lafayette in order to minimize the cost to the school and make our suggestions more appealing to the administration. Fortunately, Lafayette has programs and professors eager to integrate anti-racist lessons into their courses and many preexisting resources to draw from. For incoming professors, there are seminars and training programs available to prepare them for their work on topics of racism. The Center for the Integration of Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship (CITLS), as well as the Hanson Center, are both involved in efforts to increase the accessibility of such resources to both students and professors, however, as we have discussed, there is a lack of cohesion between the various programs on campus directed towards these efforts. Throughout our project, in our research and interviews, we found that approaching this issue at the level of the professor would be most effective within the constraints that we had. While future efforts from the students and the administration are also vital, through our interview with Professor Rossman, we determined that professors are the most well-equipped currently to make a change in this way. Previous capstone projects have worked on similar issues such as the Justice in Acopian project which had previously determined as well that there were gaps in the engineering (studies) curriculum. While their project more generally suggested the broader and earlier integration of racial and environmental justice courses into the engineering studies curriculum, we made the determination that a more comprehensive approach that strives to integrate these ideals across the engineering division as a whole was necessary for addition to their suggestions. Looking beyond our project timeline, we hope that both the Hanson Center and CITLS consider our proposals to create a syllabus review program for the engineering program, continue to build their existing resources, and work to communicate closely with professors around these topics.
Future Capstones
Future iterations of this capstone project should build effective communication between engineering professors and the Hanson center as well as Engineering professors and those in the humanities. (Anthropology & Sociology, Africana Studies, International Affairs, etc.). Many professors in non-engineering departments have already developed courses on environmental justice through the lens of critical race theory that incorporates engineering issues, such as Professor Gallemore’s International Affairs/Environmental Studies course “Mapping Environmental Justice” and Professor Fernandes’ English course “Nature Writing”. These professors’ experience and knowledge in racial education and the impacts of the engineered world are valuable resources that should not be ignored in helping to integrate anti-racist pedagogy into Lafayette engineering. Additionally, developing measures of accountability and assessing students’ understanding of this topic is a vital tool that needs to be developed in order to measure the impacts of these efforts going forward. We suggest that developing a yearly survey for engineering students that records the classes they took as well as how these courses impacted their understanding of the intersection of race and technology could be a valuable step in efforts to expand this type of education to the greater engineering department.
Overall, these efforts to integrate an understanding of the racial and societal contexts of engineering into the curriculums of the Lafayette Engineering department will require ongoing concerted efforts from students, faculty, and administration in the ongoing years in order to accomplish the goals and reflect the images Lafayette holds for itself as an institution that values diversity and inclusion. Lafayette, however, is uniquely positioned as a liberal arts school with strong humanities programs to work towards integrating a cohesive understanding of the societal and racial impacts of engineering by bringing in the perspectives and experiences of other departments. Regardless of the difficulty of such a transition, we believe that such efforts are vital for the continued success of Lafayette as an institution dedicated to providing a well-rounded education to its students.
To find the works cited for this project click here.