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ABSTRACTSocietal perceptions of engineering as a discipline now depict engineering as a profession that enables social, economic, and environmental problems to be addressed on a global scale. This expanded view of engineering has had myriad impacts on priorities for engineering education and practice. One such impact has been to foreground discussions about the role that empathy may play in engineering practice. This manuscript discusses the evolution of the concept of empathy in the engineering field, and the relevance of empathy to various generic engineering attributes, including leadership, problem-solving, and design thinking. The manuscript then discusses the idea that motivation plays a central role in improving and increasing empathy in engineering work.

ABSTRACTIt is becoming increasingly clear that if we are to address intangible and global problems such as the interconnections of climate change and poverty, all professions, including engineering, must work together to understand and mitigate against their own contributions to these injustices. It is therefore critical to support engineering students to respond to problems that are not just technical in nature and to do so with justice, equity and a sense of sustainability. This article reports results from a course intended to help students learn critical thinking in order to develop an understanding of how the profession might enhance social and environmental justice. Features of the course which were shown to support the development of students’ critical thinking, were the intensive mode of teaching, a community project related to social justice(and not just community service) and an innovative application of threshold concept theory in the development of a new assessment tool which enabled the tracking of students’ progress through their liminal space of learning.

AbstractTo society’s detriment, women remain under-represented among engineering students and practicing engineers in Australia. Many studies have shown that engineering workplaces have features that are not gender inclusive. Efforts to improve engineering education by increasing industry engagement might therefore also result in non-inclusive student experiences, with potentially detrimental outcomes. This study reports on a pilot investigation of the gender inclusivity of industry engagement by student engineers. We explored experiences of exposure to engineering practice by students who were studying at an urban Australian university. The study used the framework of possible selves, which examines the factors that motivate people to achieve or avoid possible future selves [Markus, H., and P. Nurius. 1986. “Possible Selves.” American Psychologist41: 954–969.]. Through interviews with four female and two male engineering students, we discovered gendered encounters experienced by students and the impacts these had on their perception of their future and their current directions. The female students reported marginalising gendered encounters similar to those reported by female engineers in other studies. The pilot highlights the need for further investigation.