Metaphors of Change: Navigating a Revolution in Engineering Education

ABSTRACT

Engineering education is often decontextualized, even as it is suffused with metaphoric language and sociocultural norms and beliefs. Efforts to embed social context and sociotechnical content in engineering education are often met with resistance. We contribute to conversations about how to change dominant knowledge regimes by detailing the process by which a team grapples with efforts to change technically-focused curricula and practices in engineering education – and faculty members’ values and beliefs about them – by invoking metaphors. Metaphors of war and revolution, conversion/evangelism, and care permeate faculty discourse as they interpret and attempt to enact change. We show how these metaphors are significant in the ways that they both enable and constrain possibilities for change.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• metaphor
• change
• war
• conversion
• evangelism
• care

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, Award #1519453 IUSE/PFE RED: Developing Changemaking Engineers. The authors would like to thank the RED team and the faculty members at the School of Engineering who contributed to this research. We would also like to thank the editors, Dr. Kacey Beddoes and Dr. Cyrus Mody, and the two anonymous reviewers for Engineering Studies whose thoughtful reflections have contributed greatly to the development of this paper. The second author also acknowledges support of National Science Foundation through the Independent Research and Development program in contributing to the development of this manuscript. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Turner, Drama, Fields, and Metaphors, 30–31.

2 Riley, Engineering and Social Justice; see also Godfrey and Parker, “Mapping the Cultural Landscape.”

3 Banks and Lachney, “Engineered Violence”; Cech and Waidzunas, “Navigating the Heteronorma-tivity”; Faulkner, “The Power and the Pleasure?; Pawley et al., “Translating Theory on Color-Blind Racism.”

4 Olson, The Past Half Century of Engineering.

5 Andersen, “Purification”; Lucena and Schneider, “Engineers, Development, and Engineering Education”; Lynch and Kline, “Engineering Practice and Engineering Ethics”; Nieusma and Blue, “Engineering and War.”

6 Breslin, “The Making of Computer Scientists”; Camacho and Lord, Borderlands of Education; Cech, “Culture of Disengagement?”; Chen et al., “Navigating Equity Work in Engineering;” Lucena, Engineering Education for Social Justice; Pawley et al., “Translating Theory on Color-Blind Racism”; Riley, “Rigor/Us”; Slaton, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity; Slaton, “Metrics of Marginality.”

7 Morrison and Milliken, “Organizational Silence.” Organizational silence refers to employees’ tendencies within an organization to acquiesce or fail to respond to organizational inequities and injustices.

8 Pawley et al., “Panel Session.”

9 Slaton, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity; Lucena, Defending the Nation.

10 c.f. Bornstein, The Spirit of Development.

11 Camacho, “Power and Privilege”; Martin et al., “The Politics of Care in Technoscience”; Murphy, “Unsettling Care.”

12 e.g. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology.

13 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; Hayles, How We Became Posthuman; Franklin, “Science as Culture”; Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science; Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan(C)_Meets_OncoMouse(TM).

14 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 286.

15 Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science; Scott, Seeing Like a State; Li, The Will to Improve; Mitchell, Rule of Experts.

16 NSF, “IUSE / Professional Formation of Engineers.”

17 ibid.

18 NSF, “Award Abstract #1519453.”

19 See, for example, Roberts and Lord, “Making Engineering Sociotechnical”; Lord et al., “Developing Changemaking Engineers.”

20 Lord et al. “Developing Changemaking Engineers”.

21 Breslin et al., “Design for the Future”; Lord et al., “Teaching Social Responsibility”; Lord et al., “Creative Curricula for Changemaking Engineers”; Mejia et al., “Revealing the Invisible”; Schneider et al., “Engineering to Help.”

22 See the multiple different grant initiatives in Lord et al., “Developing Changemaking Engineers.”

23 Ashoka U is an international network of universities that promotes social entrepreneurship and ‘changemaker’ values, broadly defined.

24 Research for this article was approved by the University of San Diego’s Institutional Review Board, approval # 2014-11-105.

25 Maxwell and Chmiel, “Notes Toward a Theory.”

26 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; Sapir and Crocker, The Social Use of Metaphor; Sontag, Illness as Metaphor; Turner, Drama, Fields, and Metaphors.

27 Sapir, “The Anatomy of a Metaphor,” 6–12; see also Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.

28 Crocker, “The Social Functions of Rhetorical Forms,” 38-39.

29 Ibid.

30 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 3.

31 Ibid., 3–4.

32 Ibid., 4.

33 Foucault, The Order of Things.

34 Douglas, Purity and Danger; Turner, The Forest of Symbols; Turner, Drama, Fields, and Metaphors.

35 Wyatt, “Danger!”; Brahnam et al., “(Un)Dressing the Interface”; Helmreich, “Flexible Infections”; Boellstorff, “Culture of the Cloud”; Eglash, “Broken Metaphor”; Wagner, “Mathematical Marriages.”

36 Martin, “The Egg and The Sperm”; Martin, Flexible Bodies; Martin, “Medical Metaphors of Women’s Bodies”; Sontag, Illness as Metaphor.

37 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor.

38 DiGiacomo, “Metaphor as Illness.”

39 Chavez, The Latino Threat.

40 Asma, “Metaphors of Race”; Martin, “Medical Metaphors of Women’s Bodies.”

41 Wyatt, “Danger!” 249.

42 Bowdle and Gentner, “The Career of Metaphor,” 193.

43 Wyatt, “Danger!”

44 Bijker, “The Need for Public Intellectuals,” 446.

45 Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 822.

46 Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity”; Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.

47 Cohn, “Sex and Death,” 708.

48 Ibid., 704.

49 Slaton, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity.

50 Turner, Drama, Fields, and Metaphors, 30–31.

51 Harding, “Convicted by the Holy Spirit,” 178.

52 Cernera and Morgan, eds, Examining the Catholic Intellectual Tradition; Pulido, “A Vocation of Space.”

53 Li, The Will to Improve, 4.

54 Ibid., 5.

55 Costanza-Chock, Design Justice; Irani, “Design Thinking.”

56 Li, The Will to Improve, 5; see also Comaroff, “Christianity and Colonialism in South Africa.”

57 Chen et al., “Navigating Equity Work in Engineering.”

58 Li, The Will to Improve, 4.

59 e.g. Hochschild, Commercialization of Human Feeling; Luxton, More than a Labour of Love.

60 Chen et al., “Navigating Equity Work in Engineering.”

61 Riley, “Rigor/Us.”

62 Puig de la Bellacasa, “Matters of Care in Technoscience”; Martin et al., “The Politics of Care in Technoscience”; Murphy, “Unsettling Care.”

63 Martin et al., “The Politics of Care in Technoscience,” 629.

64 Crocker, “The Social Functions of Rhetorical Forms.”

65 See also Cohn, “Sex and Death.”

66 Turner, Drama, Fields, and Metaphors, 30–31.

67 Fienup-Riordan, “Metaphors of Conversion,” 112.

68 Wyatt, “Danger!,” 258.

69 Suchman, “Located Accountabilities in Technology Production.”

70 Liboiron, “Care and Solidarity.”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Division of Engineering Education and Centers [grant number 1519453].