By Dr. Patricia Kelly
The New Testament quote (Matthew 22:21) I adapted in this title contains Christ’s pragmatic advice about how to serve both God, the spiritual and Caesar, the pragmatic. I use Gaia in Lovelock’s terms (2016) as a single, interconnected living system composed of all living and non-living organisms. The quote seemed an appropriate metaphor for my experience working in engineering education. I am not an engineer. My background is Humanities, language, media and cultural studies, but I have now worked in and researched engineering education for over twenty years. This short reflection aims to support educators who may be engaging with the following challenges. One is how to address the ‘cultural lag’ involved in changing priorities from solely economic goals to sustainable futures (Chen,2019). Closely related to this, is the ‘time-lag’ gap between ineffective practice and the curriculum renewal needed to meet the increasing demand for Education for Sustainable Development (Desha, Hargraves & Smith, 2009).I summarise my response, beginning with how I became involved.
“Houston, we have a problem”: the history
In the 1990s, the large (200 +), first year engineering cohorts at the Australian university where I was a cross-cultural curriculum developer, were diverse in cultural, social and religious backgrounds. There were few female students and students resented group work. The female lecturer of a compulsory professional engineering studies subject asked if I would work with her on teaching strategies to try to bring students together. Our aim was to contribute to the profession’s call for a ‘new culture of engineering’, developing broad communication skills, ethical and cultural awareness and a critical approach (IEAust, 1996).
The subject content and process challenged the accepted stereotype of engineers. This Litany, in Causal Layered Analysis terms (Inayatullah, 2004),was described by the dominant voices in the first cohort as “big tough men who build stuff and drink a lot”. They had no time for “fluffy stuff” like culture, gender issues or the environment. In response, we devised tutorials to develop students’ group work skills, rather than just throwing them into groups and expecting them to ‘get on’. Content was complemented by visual and written resources, chosen to challenge their thinking. For example, here is a lecture slide I used (Figure 1). It contains two quotes I took from Fighting Nature, a five minute video we showed from a Film Australia series on Australian history and culture. The 1925 film narration spruiks a male-dominated, conquest discourse that still drives destruction of natural environments today. Juxtaposed to this, the late Aboriginal Elder Bill Neidje shares an alternative, sacralised view of nature. It is also realistic, since in destroying nature, we destroy ourselves.
I introduced learning journals to help students write better through reflecting on content and process. Many students hated writing and chose engineering partly in the hope that they wouldn’t have to do much. Some had been criticised at school for poor writing. Some were having to write in their second or other language. Responses to our early work included “Are you two lesbians? In which case there are help places for people like you!” and “I come from a family of military engineers. I bet they never had to deal with this crap!” The research helped me to understand that behind anger is often fear. They didn’t know why engineers had to do this work and they didn’t know how to begin. Sadly, some were challenged by having to have an opinion,” What do I think about this?” and were unsure what such terms as culture, sustainability, globalisation, ethics etc. meant in an engineering context (Kelly, 2006).
I was an experienced teacher, but aggressive sexualised responses were new to me and my confidence took a dive. This coincided with meeting Prof. Sohail Inayatullah and having my thinking rearranged through a short course in Futures Studies. Cutting this story short, I embarked on a PhD in order to find out if my approach was crap – or not. Six years of experience, trying new strategies and evaluating, evaluating, evaluating, demonstrated that it wasn’t. I struggled to understand and apply two methodologies, Dervin’s Sense-Making methodology (2003) and Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis (2004) to surveys, learning journals and interviews with volunteer students. This process enabled me to identify and summarise some key learnings.
Firstly, most students were willing to engage with change (~65%), some realised its worth over time, (~25%) and around 10% hated it from start to finish. The important issue here is that there will always be such a group, especially when you begin something new which challenges current assumptions and power. But it is usually a small group and they, and their educators, need to know that they do NOT speak for the whole group. They are the dominant voice, used to controlling their environment through gender, class, ethnicity, status or whatever. While they are entitled to their stage of development (‘resistings’, not resisters) they should not hold others back, as they often do. They can also intimidate teachers who try something new, as student evaluations play a critical role in gaining work or promotion in increasingly casualised academic workplaces where teachers can feel like piece-workers of the mind. Since 2011, the percentage of ‘resistings’ in the cohorts has dropped to ~ 1-3%. This may be due to changing societal attitudes and effective teaching strategies but also to the greater acceptance of the ideas, as more cohorts experience the new approach.
Secondly, change and transformation, from What’s In It For Me? thinking to We’re In This Together thinking is possible, even in the short space of a semester. The transformation that the data revealed, in thinking and personal growth, was moving and profound. I use Mezirow’s definition, in which transformation doesn’t just mean reassessing our assumptions but ‘acting’ on our new insights (1990, 18). Analysing student journals and interviews allowed me to identify a set of qualities I characterised as Globo sapiens, wise global citizen/professionals, prepared and willing to take responsibility for themselves, their communities and the planet (Kelly, 2006, 2008).This is on the way to Arjen Wals’ ‘transhuman competence’, an ecological perspective that values all life, human and non-human (2010, 386; Luyckx, 1999).
Thirdly, at a meta level, CLA helped me to identify three graduate visions that appear in engineering education: Globally Portable, Globally Competent and Globo sapiens. These are summarised in the table below. I think that global competence is now in the ascendant, but incorporating the third remains a challenge.
| Globally portable Vision:
Dominant |
Globally Competent Vision: Homo globalis
Emerging, reforming |
Wise Global Citizens Vision: Globo sapiens
Preferred, transformative |
|
| Litany | We do any job – No limits Engineering | We do it smarter | We do better things, see differently |
| Systemic | Economy as main driver
Business as usual Satisfy system, gain recognition Learning as transmission of uncontested knowledge “Cope with – manage” diversity as temporary problem |
Economy as main driver
Detailed research describes problems Creative industries/entrepreneurs Critical reflection to improve efficiency |
“view from space” – ecology sets limits
Sustainable futures, shift of consciousness Transformative education Learning as change – individuals and institutions make changes necessary for sustainability |
| Worldview | Serve the market – it will serve you
Teachers “produce” student “products” |
Progressive, adapt to change
Capitalism with a “human face” Learning for change Expand democracy, ‘productive’ diversity Reflect on why we are learning |
Deep sustainability
Changing society based on social wisdom <-> learning society (Barnett, 1997) Challenge foundational assumptions (Inayatullah, 2003, p.3) |
| Myth-Metaphor | “Earth yields to the dominion of ‘man’” | We can manage the earth – Techno-fix future | Heal ourselves – heal the planet
Includes unconscious fields of awareness, “microvita”, alternative “memes” (Inayatullah, Ibid.) |
Table 1: Adapted from Kelly, 2006, 349
The champion of this work left the university and others, with less commitment to change and more interest in the “entrepreneurial” approach, took over. I moved interstate and was asked to work with another engineering faculty. In the film, Groundhog Day, the main character is condemned to repeat a single day until he learns how to live better. In my new context, group work was again a problem. The cohorts were similarly diverse and resisted working together. The first year coordinator was dubious of the new approach, but very supportive. TheDean of Teaching and Learning found money to pay me, so we applied the learning’s from my research. Calling the initial group work tutorials, ‘Teamwork Foundations’ avoided the work being regarded as ‘airy-fairy’ and ‘time-wasting’. It took several years to reintroduce the idea of Peer Interviews, in which students share their learning journals with another student from a different background. These again proved effective in improving confidence and understanding, and often eye-opening, as students realised that others had different approaches to learning and that their opinions were not necessarily shared by their peers.
Fast-forward to Ground Hog Day
We evaluated our work through informal in class Minute Evaluations, which most students willingly complete. “Three things I have learnt or am taking away from today’s class are…”And “One unanswered question I am leaving with today is…” These evaluations work because they are quick and easy, a simple one A4 page, completed in class. We collate the responses for the lecturer and make sure that the unanswered questions are responded to quickly. Once we showed that the strategies were relevant to content and that students who work together are happier and more productive, other lecturers began to ask for support. The approach we used includes strategies for working with staff and students. These have been reported elsewhere (Kelly, Smith & Ford, 2012) and have been updated in a forthcoming paper, written with a colleague, Diana Collett.
One positive new element included an online Cultural Forum where students post and share responses to questions such as “what does culture mean to you?”Their answers contribute to their assessment tasks. This is run by the university’s Indigenous Program staff. Reconciliation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians is a university (and national) commitment. Australia is a settler-colonial society and is in the process of trying to right ongoing wrongs. The issue and our learning’s are relevant to the many other countries with indigenous populations, also usually marginalised. A local student from an English speaking background wrote in a journal, used with permission:
The most interesting thing I learnt from the Cultural Forums is the number of issues facing the many Aboriginal communities of Australia… including Stolen Generations, Native Title, deaths in custody, social dislocation, Land Rights and the ever-going effects of racism. … [u]ntil now I have not understood the gravity of the situation. …I now understand just how important it is … to show respect and understanding. (Male, 2017)
A second was collaborative work with a student counsellor with experience in process psychology. She introduced the concept of Rank, or our personal use of power and how it works in groups. This was part of building intercultural awareness and capacity in what Homi Bhabha (1994) calls Third Spaces. Students self-evaluated their teamwork competence and team inclusivity through Likert scale (1-5: Not Competent, Not Inclusive to Very Competent, Very Inclusive) raters included in the minute evaluations at the start and end of each semester. The figure below compares the first (n total =492) and second raters (n total = 396 )from 2015-18, as a percentage, in Course A, a compulsory first year course. The Fishtail Effect showing change in desired directions, appears each year for both teamwork and inclusivity raters, although it is more pronounced for the inclusivity rater in each cohort. Using a T test, in both inclusivity and teamwork, the improvement is highly significant statistically at the 99% confidence level. We feel extremely confident that we are measuring a genuine difference.
Which future?
We now have over twenty years’ accumulated evidence of the effectiveness of our approach in bringing about attitude change and in developing values such as inclusivity, empathy and ethics, regarded as neglected in traditional engineering education. These are global education issues, as more students study abroad in Asia and Europe, cohorts are more diverse and the problems graduates have to face grow more complex. Employability and Growth continue to dominate discipline and institutional discourse. Measuring progress through the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been a misused and destructive concept. A healthier alternative could be the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) (Costanza, Lawn, Lowe & Martin, 2019). Caesar, in the form of whatever short-term ‘deliverables’ the ‘Market’ seems to want, continues to challenge and oppose the need to serve Gaia, sustainability. In higher education, this usually means that staff is expected to do more with less and curricula are squeezed according to whatever Big Idea is in favour.
Edwards Deming is attributed with saying, “Survival is optional. No-one has to change”. If education institutions were serious, they would be championing, as a matter of urgency, the development of qualities and skills that (engineering) graduates need to mitigate the consequences of decades of inaction around global crises such as climate change. I first wrote “mitigate or avoid” but it is too late for that. I work with engineers because I realised what a huge impact they have on the world and it has been my teaching privilege to see how they can change and grow if we give them half a chance, as Chen also demonstrates with Taiwanese students (2019).
Whatever futures await us, I see no evidence of the Business As Usual future that so much education still peddles. Nor do any of the latest reports on the environment (Stern, 2018; Ripple, Wolf, Newsome et al., 2017).
On reflection, I see that I have become a bit ‘engineered’ myself, less able to include challenging material and with reducing paid hours. There are so many lecturers and teachers who, like me, want to contribute to a better world but who are constrained by time, funds, curricula and institution priorities etc. But small changes can make a big difference. I have learnt to contribute as and where I can, integrating the pragmatic with the transformational through engineering education, sustainability education and socially transformative learning scholarship. We may bow to Caesar but we can still serve Gaia.
Dr Patricia Kelly, PhD, SFSEDA has worked in staff development, cross cultural curriculum development and engineering education at several Australian universities. Her PhD research investigated transformative engineering education from a critical futures perspective. She collaborates with engineering teaching teams to improve students’ teamwork and communication skills, particularly written communication and intercultural skills. She reviews for various journals, including Futures and the Journal of Futures Studies, and for conferences. She can be reached at pakelly@westnet.com.au.
Acknowledgements
I thank all the students and staff who so generously share their learnings; Umar Sheraz and Ian Lowe for their helpful comments on the text; and Sohail Inayatullah, who continues to inspire me.
References
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