WIP: How Students Develop as Critically Conscious Engineers – The Impact of an Engineering Design Course Embedded With Critical Consciousness

This Work in Progress paper presents the impact of a mid-year engineering design course in an Electrical and Computer Engineering curriculum on students' critical consciousness and engineering identity. This work addresses two gaps in scholarship and practice, namely, the incorporation of mid-year design into a traditional curriculum where design is only taught formally in the capstone year. Second, the embeddedness of contextual perspectives in design to incorporate a systems-level understanding of design about social, political, cultural, and economic constructs. The contribution to educational practice includes understanding how such a course can sustain or develop student identification with engineering about critical consciousness. Results from this work show that students' critical consciousness gains in the course are not only tied to the learning objectives, but also to the design aspects of the course where the students performed engineering skills and were recognized by peers in the course as engineers.