CS1: Shock

After watching the news coverage of a massive earthquake in an area where you once conducted a research project, you decide to incorporate in your 3rd-year Engineering course a lecture on the “Role of the Global Engineer in Society”. In the lecture you connect the topic to the immediate context of the humanitarian crisis in the earthquake zone, and draw heavily on social justice theory.  You assume the students will engage quickly with the well-timed topic, so you plan to schedule 30 minutes at the end of class for heated discussion; instead, they sit passively after your lecture and do not immediately engage in the group discussion.

After an awkward silence one student comments: “Instead of talking about the morals and ethics of engineering in society, I think that we should be using class time to focus on the technical problems involved here. The other ‘stuff’ we’ll figure out later, once we get going in our careers.”  The majority of the class nods in agreement.

Later that week, you decide to draft a proposal to your department to lead an ISL component in this same course next year and to take the students to the community that has been affected by the earthquake. You find that your goal is supported by both the university’s mission/vision statement and international engineering standards set for Global Engineering competencies.  You say to one of your colleagues:  “This will be the best way to shock my students into understanding that being a professional engineer isn’t just about technical skill.”

Motivations

• • What are the ethical motivations for wanting to engage in ISL?
  • When is a “one-time” project like this appropriate?
  • Is international engagement preferable to classroom based analysis in this scenario?
  • How might the professor justify their motivations for this project to the students? The department head? The community in the affected area?
  • Is there a secondary research agenda attached to this initiative?
  • How can we name the critical moments that shift the identity of the educator’s teaching approach and teaching philosophy?
  • What expertise can this group of students bring to the relief projects in the affected area?
  • What inspires the professor to transform their overall approach to the course?
  • What steps does a professor take to ground the international service component of their course development in ethical process?
  • At this stage of the process, whose input is missing in the development of this course?
  • What implications might “shocking” students into understanding have for how students might engage with the community partner if they’re disinterested in skills outside of technical?
  • Who has the professor connected with to be the community partner on this project? Is the community partnership equal to or secondary to the professor’s academic planning?

Training and Education

Some things to consider in this case study might be how a teacher’s perspective on education, as a whole, must shift in order to accommodate the additional demands and processes of International Engagement and International Service-Learning. While preparing students for an international experience there may be times that traditional classroom—often referred to as the “banking model” of education, in which the teacher deposits information into the students’ heads—knowledge transference from teacher to student is appropriate, but for the most part, this traditional model assumes that the faculty member is keeper of knowledge and experience and their job is to disseminate.

To adopt an ethical process of engagement in ISL at the early stages of course development, the shift from traditional education models to a transformative education model demands the teacher relinquish the control and, ultimately, power that comes with the role of lecturer. Edmund O’Sullivan (2003) succinctly describes Transformative Education processes as involving the experience of:

…a deep, structural shift in the basic premises of thought, feelings, and actions. It is a shift of consciousness that dramatically and irreversibly alters our way of being in the world. Such a shift involves our understanding of ourselves and our self-locations; our relationships with other humans and with the world; our understanding of relations of power in interlocking structures of class, race and gender; our body awarenesses, our visions of alternative approaches to living; and our sense of possibilities for social justice and peace and personal joy.

Transformative Education suggests that maximizing human potential and building human relationships are the goals of educational processes. Within transformative education is the incorporation of contextual diversity into the learning process, which can include work outside of the classroom and experiences that create conflict and tension in a student. Moments of conflict contain the potential for transformation to occur. The faculty member in this scenario is not ethically compromised because of a desire to “shock” the students into embracing the social justice dimensions of their chosen profession; however, the incorporation of crisis and shock into a course must be housed within a pedagogy that frames the conflict in a constructive and transformative way. Transformative education pedagogy is just one of the many pedagogies and theories that include conflict, human relationship, and socially just student engagement in their expression of core principles.

Considering the ethical domain, it is a shift towards constructing meaning within the learning process in consultation and cooperation with the student and the community partner. Therefore, in “Case Study #1: Shock”, one must wonder how a faculty member can make all of the decisions surrounding the how and what of an ISL course before establishing a relationship with a community partner and making those decisions in consultation and cooperation with that community partner. In this scenario, in which a teacher incorporates ISL to further “shock” their students into understanding, it is questionable whether the teacher’s approach to the ISL process is one of projecting experience onto rather than making meaning with the students; furthermore, is this professor approaching service as an act imposed onto the community partner, versus in consultation with and response to the community partner?

According a woman who works for a Mexican NGO in Comitan, Mexico, an NGO that invites university students on service-learning programs to join their project, “one should enter the volunteer act acknowledging both sides [and the] dialectic relationship between the individual and the collective”. Faculty members who plan ISL must have constant awareness of the dialectical service relationship between themselves and the community partner, the dialectical learning relationship between themselves and the students, and the dialectical relationship between themselves and the collective (community partner and students together).

The faculty member in Caser Study #1 is at the beginning of a project planning process and the project is, essentially, bridging community development with academia and engaging in a thoughtful process of planning will go a long way to prevent ethical quagmires. Here are some suggestions on how to project plan with ethical considerations in mind:

• Acknowledge that this experience may be a transformative experience for you as an educator and for the community partner in their work with foreign-service providers.
• Spend the time that is needed to establish a meaningful partnership with the community that you will take the students to. This might mean that, ideally, you will travel to the site and build the relationship with the community partner firsthand.
• Plan the curriculum for your course and the field experience component in consultation with the community partner to ensure you are addressing a true need from the community.
• Investigate the potential for partnerships on campus with other faculty members, programs, and service providers whose international engagement processes could be considered “thoughtful” and “ethical”.
• Question your own assumptions about international service-learning work and, through this questioning, work on your skills as a reflective practitioner. Consider the following questions from an international community partner at a Mexican NGO:

What is [your] social representation of the other? What are my political thoughts? Politics are very important. What are the internal notions that drive my thoughts and actions? What is the agenda that drives the dialogue of me, the volunteer? These questions are important and should be answered honestly because everyone has an agenda and impacts how they interact in a project. It impacts what they listen to, ask about, and seek to be the truth of the situation.