“Should We Build This?”: Student Reasoning in Intentionally Facilitated Socio-technical Design Talks
In pre-college engineering education contexts, detailed explorations of student discourse and teacher moves have begun to emerge. For example, recent studies have shown how particular teacher questions prompt student reasoning during particular phases of the engineering design process (Capobianco, deLisi, & Radloff, 2018) and how a teacher’s valuing of heterogeneous ideas sets the stage for students to take epistemic agency in engineering (Carlone, Mercier, & Metzger, 2021).
We are developing case studies of specific types of teacher-supported conversation in which students are asked to consider design decision-making not just as a technical task, but as a complex socio-technical activity with ethical, economic, and political dimensions. Our work foregrounds a perspective of care in students’ engineering discourse and builds on emerging frameworks exploring compassionate design, macroethics and ideology, and critical socio-technical literacy. In this paper and its related poster, we summarize our first year of design talk enactments and analysis.