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Engineering education has been increasingly challenged to transform outdated instructional practices that affect students’ persistence and success and to incorporate equity and justice-oriented goals into engineering curricula. Spurred by these arguments, this three-article dissertation examines the literacies, discourses, and pedagogical possibilities of engineering design.
The first study is a scoping review of the literature associated with engineering disciplinary literacies. I reviewed a significant body of studies focused on engineers’ literacies (i.e., engineers' ways of making meaning with texts and language) and the teaching and learning of engineering literacies in K-16. Findings highlight that diverse traditions have explored engineering literacies in professional and educational settings. However, frameworks and experiences supporting youth’s critical inquiry and social change-oriented participation in engineering design projects are scarce.
The second article addresses literature gaps by focusing on a case study of transformative teaching and learning within an undergraduate project-based engineering course. The course was grounded in human-centered design, a commitment-driven approach that values human needs and experiences as essential throughout design processes and has been used to advance social change in engineering. The findings underscore the teaching movements that supported students’ learning and practice of engineering literacies as tools for enacting conscious and contextually meaningful forms of engineering that centered communities.
The third study interrogates the discourses of engineering design in engineering education scholarship. I analyzed patterns in a corpus of engineering education scholarly articles (N = 7,414) published between 1990 and 2024, using topic modeling—a machine learning technique for examining large corpora—in combination with qualitative interpretive analysis of a sample of articles. I particularly focused on engineering design and issues of equity and justice in engineering. Findings highlight that emerging pockets of scholarship are attending to power and social justice, both in general and in the practice of engineering design. However, in the diverse range of topics found in the study, significant lines still represent engineering without considering its inherent ties to equity and justice. Together, the three studies contribute to a deeper understanding of engineering discourses, literacies, and pedagogies, and they point to new possibilities in engineering education.
