The education-world dilemma of Education’s autonomy: The case of K-12 engineering education

Abstract

This paper addresses a dilemma of education’s autonomy: if an educational goal is to be universal, how do people’s current problems and concerns are supposed to be integrated or addressed in the educational work, and specifically in teaching the curriculum? The paper looks at this dilemma with a particular educational perspective and within a particular curricular context, namely, how Biesta’s (2022) ideas of grown-up-ness and a middle ground can be employed in K-12 engineering courses. The notion of relative autonomy in education is analyzed and rejected as a way to address the dilemma. Instead, expansive approaches to engineering are reviewed to analyze how their ethical frameworks offer insights about K-12 engineering education that support education’s autonomy. Following Biesta’s work and these frameworks, it is suggested to introduce resistance and raise issues of social power structures in K-12 engineering education, and to shift the attention about engineering from a future occupation in which one needs to be trained to a sphere of human interactions that invites and encourages students to demonstrate grown-up-ness. The paper offers creating situations that “shake” (but not break) the ground beneath the engineering aspirations of the students, and pulling students in and out of what we might call the engineering “zone”; between the world-destruction end of taking the engineering path towards engineering studies and career in any cost and whatever are the difficulties and consequences, and the self-destruction end of regarding engineering as something that is not for me after experiencing it in school. The educational work of the teacher is to push students toward (or encourage to stay in) the in-between area that involves doubts regarding the students’ “existential fitness” to demonstrate human subject-ness. The paper demonstrates the complexity in characterizing education’s relationships with specific social spheres and practices if education’s autonomy is to be maintained.

Introduction

The movement for education’s autonomy is occupied with a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, there is an attempt to articulate and defend what is educational in education, finding, asserting, and justifying an educational perspective, and rejecting any inappropriate external intervention in educational though and practice. On the other hand, there is a world out there, with crises and problems that seriously impact the lives of individuals, communities, societies, and humanity as a whole. How, if any, the world out there should be reflected in education? How should education address the world, while at the same time keep its own integrity? The problem can also be formulated in temporal terms. Thus, on the one hand, there is an attempt to deal with the eternal questions of being a human and of morality, and to found education on humanistic principles and on an idealistic obligation to focus on universal educational goals. On the other hand, while there is a refusal to surrender to the (political) demands of the here and now and rejecting any external – and in late-modernity, especially neoliberal – influences on education, there are a host of contemporary local, regional, and global issues that education might need to consider. As Bridges (2008) claims: “Educational institutions must look ‘beyond the immediate and the particular,’ escape ‘the parochialism of the present.’ Their focus should be not on this week’s particular social issue, but on what is of enduring significance in human and social experience” (p. 473).

To name only few issues, how do educational programs should address threats to democracy such as the January 6^th Insurrection in Washington, DC and the recent attacks on January 8th in Brasilia, Brazil? To what degree climate change and the intensifying environmental crisis should be at the center of education? What about refuges dying in their attempts to secure and reach new lives? What about Russia invasion to and war in Ukraine? And the COVID-19 pandemic? And Islamic fundamentalist terrorism? And gun violence? And technological-social phenomena such as artificial intelligence (AI) and digital currency (especially cryptocurrency)? If an educational goal is to be universal, beyond any context, how do people’s current problems and concerns are supposed to be integrated or addressed in the educational work, and specifically in curriculum (or teaching the curriculum)?

The undesired situation of developing an educational perspective that seeks to be autonomous but without considering the world makes it difficult to negotiate the two temporal aspects, the eternal and the current, to associate education with contemporary predicaments of individuals, societies, and humanity as a whole, and consequently distances theoretical programs from curricular and pedagogical discussions; simply put, deliberations on what educational in education turn away from what (and how) to teach and learn in schools. An important aspect in this regard is lack of attention (to put it mildly) by educational perspectives to the relationships between education as a practice and other spheres of practice, especially those who present in schools as subject matters.

As a response to this disregard, I explore in this paper possible connections between a suggested educational perspective and a particular K-12 curricular area: engineering. While usually not considered a problem or a concern in itself, the focus on engineering stems from the centrality of engineering in our lives, the increased demand for engineers, the possible negative impacts of engineering projects, and the rise of scholarly interest in K-12 engineering education. I begin with reviewing a common way to address the education-world dilemma through the notion of relative autonomy and highlight its problems. Next, I present Biesta’s (2022) proposal for avoiding both instrumentalism and disconnection from society by a specific educational task of “grown-up-ness.” In the following section, I look at how expansive approaches to engineering offer ethical frameworks to address concerns over ramifications of engineering to society and the environment. The ethical aspect in engineering is not the only one that might provide ideas about the relationship between engineering and the world (ontological questions might do it too). However, it resembles the education-world dilemma as both reflect questions of responsibility and an inquiry about who is served by a profession, and consequently what does it mean to an endeavor (engineering or education) that attempts to self-define itself. Finally, I discuss how, in light of these frameworks, Biesta’s proposal can be integrated in K-12 engineering education. It should be stressed that by linking educational theory to a particular curricular area, I do not seek to convert educational theorists into curriculum designers or developers. My hope, rather, is to advance a discussion about how the pursuit of education’s autonomy can and should be demonstrated in the actual work of teachers who teach subject matters in schools.

Relative autonomy: “All things to everyone”

The education-world dilemma is demonstrated in the discussion on “relative autonomy” to characterize the relationships of education with other social, academic, or practical spheres. While relative autonomy is used to portray possible or actual relationships of education both as a practice and as an academic field, for our purposes here we will focus on the relative autonomy of education as a practice. ¹

In Spheres of Justice, Walzer (1983) develops a framework that intends to prevent domination over social goods, and argues for a distinct set of meanings, each in its own sphere. Among the distinct spheres Walzer identifies and examines, within which societies produce and exchange valued social goods, are “Security and Welfare,” “Money and Commodities,” and “Political Power” along with “Education.” Walzer is concerned about a situation in which one sphere’s meanings are threatened as a result of “intrusion from another sphere” (p. 10) and warns against a “tyranny” in the form of “a particular boundary crossing, a particular violation of social meaning” (p. 28). However, since spheres are not and cannot be isolated from others, Walzer does not offer total separation of spheres and total autonomy for each sphere in managing its affairs. Instead, Walzer suggests a kind of a partial sovereignty for spheres in the form of “relative autonomy”: “In no society, of course, are social meanings entirely distinct. What happens in one distributive sphere affects what happens in the others; we can look, at most, for relative autonomy” (p. 10). Still, Walzer seeks to protect spheres and does not rule out the authority of each sphere to manage its local endeavors; each sphere is entitled to set its own internal regulative principle, together with allowing links and relationships between spheres. ²

Blacker’s (2000) proposal uses Walzer’s notion of spheres but focuses on education. His analysis of the place and role of education, a “liberal contextualist account of schooling that balances institutional autonomy with public accountability under conditions of reasonable pluralism,” as he describes it, is a good example to an attempt to address the difficulty to allow education autonomy within complex social structure, or as Blacker frames it, “the proper political place of educational institutions in liberal democracies” (p. 229). Blacker rejects the “false dilemma of instrumentalism versus non-instrumentalism,” and instead offers a combination of social functionality and relative autonomy for education as part of a social structure that keeps stability as a result of the mere diversity of social spheres that offer an “array of socially constructed goods and practices” (p. 238). The dilemma in Blacker’s analysis between an educational perspective and the wider social environment is implicit in his claim that schooling, “qua the dominant institutionalization of the educational sphere, must answer politically to those representing spherical interests such as business, politics, civil and criminal law, the family and even athletics and public health,” and that in addition to serving “universalistic ideals and principles” and “their own sense of pursuing a uniquely educational mission,” schools in pluralistic constitutional democracies “must serve… the particularlistic goods that are socially recognized as valid” (p. 230, emphasis in original). The terminology of servitude and usefulness is evident in Blacker’s account, as he describes (or envisions) a multi-sphere space in which any sphere (including education) serves other spheres but is also granted autonomy:

this is how any spherical autonomy at all must arise: through a criss-crossing of lines of instrumentality that connect a sphere, via relations of use-value, to a range of similarly ensconced and similarly useful spheres… A sphere has standing to speak for itself when it is useful to enough other spheres such that each have their own agendas and so ‘tug’ against the sphere in question from enough competing directions. (p. 238)

And with his physical metaphor of forces, he concludes: “If there are enough of these mutually cancelling forces and they are positioned properly, there arises a kind of autonomy-relative autonomy-wherein it is possible to imagine a kind of self-standing freedom that is not obviously dependent upon any metaphysical buoy” (p. 238)

Blacker is aware of possible objections to his model of institutional autonomy, especially threats to spherical heterogeneity ³ by the economic sphere, and the concern that “a strategy of multiplying instrumentalities actually erode educational autonomy rather than build it” (p. 241). But he puts his confidence in the inevitably of “trade-offs, compromises, long and short-term strategic concessions, hard choices, even intractable, perhaps even tragic moral dilemmas” to be negotiated and taken within “the variegated social topography of complex societies” (p. 241), social interactions that are founded on a “psychological and social maturity to tolerate the subsistence of differences within and among different spheres,” as well as on “sufficient quantity” of “a simple and strong sincerity regarding the universalistically grounded public procedures that in a democracy must govern interspherical interactions” (p. 242). Blacker also relies on democratic procedures to govern the spherical heterogeneity following the “Churchillian aphorism about democracy being the worst form of government save all of the others” (p. 243). However, it seems Blacker underestimates the great pressures by other spheres on education to “deliver” and the actual asymmetric influence that exploits and abuses education in favor of other spheres (mostly, but not solely, the economic). This attitude by other spheres of practice is a social manifestation of Bauman’s (2005) description of individualization in a “liquidmodern world,” when the main figure of the hunter “could not care less about the overall ‘balance of things’” (p. 306).

Against the (optimist) picture of relative autonomy, several other scholars question the clarity of the term “relative autonomy” or doubt the feasibility of a stable and balanced social power structure that allows education, as a social sphere, to operate while maintaining sufficient autonomy for advancing a distinctive educational agenda. Thus, Gordon (1989) argues against Fritzell’s (1987) claim that relative autonomy theory has substantial potential within the sociology of education, ⁴ since “the inconsistencies in both conception and application of this approach have led to the virtual omission of the sphere of the state from the neo-Marxist sociology of education,” and this omission “leads to analyses that are over-generalised or reductionist, and which tend to make untestable assertions about the relationship between state structures and state agents” (p. 435). According to Bourdieu and Passeron (1990), it might be that education’s relative autonomy “enables it to serve external demands under the guise of independence and neutrality, i.e. to conceal the social functions it performs and so to perform them more effectively” (p. 178). Wesselingh (1997), using a sociological theory of reproduction, claims that “the increasing relative autonomy of the sphere of education is not very likely to provide a counterpart to reproduction but forms a necessary element of it” (p. 189). And Masschelein and Simons (2013) claim that while in the past, “[a]gainst the background of employment, education still retained relative autonomy in relation to society and in particular in relation to the labour market” (p. 95), today the dominant discourse in education is of employability and a type of utilitarianism in general that advocates a designed and ready-made graduate.

But perhaps the harshest critique against relative autonomy theories is provided by Hargreaves (1982). He explains that “[u]nlike resistance theory, relative autonomy theory is not so closely tied to the political objectives of social transformation,” and that its proponents “insist on the partial independence of schooling from the requirements of production,” which lead them to “strive… to explain schooling’s simultaneous dependence on and independence from the economy” (p. 115). But while the pessimist can note the “point that the very relative autonomy of schooling makes it all the more effective as an agency of reproduction because of its ostensible neutrality,” the optimist can hold that because “schooling does not always directly reflect or actively serve the economic base, it is always possible for radical groups to flourish and exert their influence in the schooling system,” and therefore “relative autonomy allows in principle for radical social change” (p. 116). Hargreaves’ analysis leads him to conclude that “the very flexibility that is the strength of relative autonomy theory is also its Achilles heel, for almost anything seems possible within it: the reproduction of class relations or the interruption of that reproduction,” and thus “‘relative autonomy’ is all things to everyone.” And the proponents “appeared to want to have it both ways, to assert both the dependence and the independence of schooling; to have their cake and eat it, so to speak. Relative autonomy theory, that is, is reproduction-bound, theoretically closed and poorly substantiated in empirical terms” (p. 119).

Biesta’s proposal: Grown-up-ness and middle ground

The attempts to defend relative autonomy do not only fail to offer a clear and realistic framework for education’s role in society, one that protects an educational perspective; they also avoid developing such a perspective. A clear educational perspective might be helpful in addressing the education-world dilemma if it satisfactorily considers the world “out there” without compromising its own integrity. Recently, Biesta (2022) attempts to do just that.

Framing the problem in terms of school and society, Biesta (2022) claims that the “school has a duty to resist society’s desires” (p. 9), and as such he rejects an education as a “delivery of particular societal agendas” and a situation of “giving each and every (educational) vision its own school, as this would simply multiply educational instrumentalism rather than oppose it” (p. 1). But Biesta also warns from creation of an educational “province” (p. 6), that is, “disconnection of education from society,” as it makes education “vulnerable for ideological ‘take over’” (p. 6). While Biesta is critical of the “creeping instrumentalism” of education, including the emptiness of the word “quality” and the discourse of “performativity” in education, he does not entirely deny the functional role of education. As he put it, “[i]n sociological terms, the modern school thus appears as a function of society and also as an institution that has an important function to perform for society” (p. 2, emphasis in original). While as an instrument “it is left to the school to secure the effective execution” of the agenda set by society, “[a]s institution, on the other hand, the school is also ‘devoted to the promotion of a particular cause or program’” (p. 2, emphasis added). Biesta is clear that “total rejection of instrumentalism runs the risk of withdrawing into an educational province where education becomes disconnected from democratic concerns” (p. 13).

Therefore, instead of the extremes of total instrumentalism and disconnection from society, Biesta (2022) offers to develop “education’s own interest” (p. 1) around “grown-up-ness,” which “concerns the question of subject-ness, of existing as subject… the question of how I am, that is, the question of how I try to relate to and coexist with the world external to me.” (p. 9, emphasis in original). Biesta (2017) explains that grown-up-ness is to acknowledge “the alterity and integrity of what and who is other… that the world ‘out there’ is indeed ‘out there’, and is neither a world of our own making nor a world that is just at our disposal, that is, a world with which we can do whatever we want or fancy” (p. 8). And Biesta is clear that “the world” “refers both to the natural and to the social world, both to the world of things and to the world of beings” (p. 8). This educational task of grown-up-ness necessitates an educational work of supporting students to “stay in the difficult ‘middle ground’ between world-destruction and self-destruction-the middle ground where grown-up co-existence with what and how is other takes place” (Biesta, 2022: 11). Biesta (2017) explains that world-destruction occurs when resistance to one’s initiatives lead them to enforce their will to the point that their “own force becomes so strong that it destroys the (integrity of the) very ‘entity’ that offers resistance,” and self-destruction occurs when the reaction to resistance is a frustration that leads to “withdraw from what offers resistance, to step away from it,” to “back off” and withdraw themselves “from any engagement with the world” (p. 14). Thus, Biesta’s solution for the dilemma between an educational perspective and addressing the world (even if he does not word it exactly as such) is adopting an educational interest that focuses on the student’s relationship with the world, with others, and the environment.

While Biesta’s refusal of total rejection of instrumentalism and his acknowledgment of education’s function for society is similar to Blacker’s (2000) rejection of the instrumentalism versus non-instrumentalism dichotomy, Biesta is aware of the delicate balance in the social power structure and how easily education’s role can deteriorate to subservient instrumentalism. That is why he adds a particular educational interest to be preserved and followed. However, what is missing here is the curricular aspect; while the educational interest refers to the “educational work,” it does not address the question about what teaching and learning subject matters in school should look like vis-à-vis the world out there. What does Biesta’s middle ground mean when it comes to developing a curriculum for and teaching, say, mathematics, the arts, or science? Biesta calls to resist “delivery of particular societal agendas,” but what about delivery of social goods (as relative autonomy term them) that are not (at least) explicitly associated to political or ideological worldviews? How, if any, should K-12 education treat engineering in light of the shortage in practicing engineers (which can be considered a social problem)? ⁵

It is important to stress: the problem is not only a matter of “application.” If Biesta’s proposal cannot be “translated” or integrated into curricular matters, and left to the vague role of the “educator,” it runs the risk of being unrealistic. I maintain that subject-ness or grown-up-ness (or any educational goal) should not be disconnected from curricular matters. The next section takes a close look at engineering as a human (and humanistic) endeavor in order to explore insights how K-12 education can treat it while keeping its own autonomy.

Engineering and ethical concerns

The focus on engineering education does not mean to suggest that the dilemma is not relevant, or less relevant, to other subject matters taught and learned in K-12 schools. However, engineering education is particularly interesting and important, beyond the reasons brought in the introduction, due to philosophy of engineering literature that examines engineering within societal and other contexts, and as such suggests how engineering is an appropriate endeavor for probing the dilemma of education’s autonomy about the world and how this dilemma is demonstrated and should be addressed when engineering becomes a K-12 subject matter. Alongside the central role engineering plays in our late-modernity lives, ⁶ there is recently not only increased interest in understanding what engineering is and how it operates, including what engineers know and do (and don’t), but also—and more importantly for us in the context of education’s autonomy—an increased concern about the ethics involved in engineering and the impacts of engineering to society and the environment, and consequently suggestions to change engineering education. In this regard, this section reviews main theoretical frameworks on ethics in engineering. But first, some introduction into philosophy of engineering and the reflective aspect of the engineer’s work are required.

Philosophy of engineering and the reflective engineer

There is not yet a well-established discipline known as philosophy of engineering, at least not as established as classic disciplines or even the other STEM (or STEAM) disciplines. Mitcham’s (1998) observation still stands that “[i]t is certainly not the case that philosophy has sponsored engineering in anything like the way it has sponsored the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities” (p. 38). Nonetheless, there is a significant progress in that direction with literature that identifies philosophical issues in engineering. Beyond ethical issues in engineering, or engineering ethics, which is a relatively established area of inquiry (Vesilind and Gunn 1998; Fleddermann and Sanadhya, 1999; Harris et al., 1996), scholars point to the issue of demarcating engineering (or the question what engineering is), the difference between engineering and technology, epistemological questions (what is the nature of engineering knowledge and the justification of such knowledge?), methodological questions (i.e. questions about the methods employed in engineering and their adequacy and justification or the way engineers think), how engineers are educated, operation of engineers in conditions of uncertainty, assessing quality of engineering, as well as metaphysical and ontological issues, for example, about the status of design or functions.

For our concern, it is important to stress the increased attention in the (philosophical but also non-philosophical) engineering literature to engineers’ reflection about their work and the responsibility they carry addressing social, ethical, political, and environmental issues, beyond just solving a particular problem. To be sure, engineers do focus on practicality. Bulleit et al. (2015) claim that “[e]ngineers are nothing if not practical,” the authors they “sincerely believe that examination of engineering philosophy will have positive practical ramifications” (p. 1). And Poel (2009) observes that “Whereas philosophers like to reflect and to problematise, engineers are action-oriented and want to solve instead of create problems” (p. 2). This practical orientation does not mean avoiding or ignoring reflection in engineers’ work. However, the reflective aspect in engineers’ work is not a known signature as it is the design aspect. As Bulleit et al. (2015) note, “the public view of engineers is often that they are not reflective; they just do what needs to be done and then move on to the next project” (p. 1). But Bulleit et al. are also clear about the need and contribution of reflection in engineers’ work:

[T]here is some recognition that engineers benefit from being more reflective and philosophical… a reflective and philosophical engineer will be a better engineer… The point here is not about continual reflection, but reflection at appropriate points while work is in progress and about work that is already complete. (Bulleit et al., 2015: 1).

Bulleit et al. conclude: “Because of the heuristic nature of engineering practice, philosophical thinking, including reflection, is an important way to enhance engineering judgment” (p. 7).

The interest in and concern about engineers’ work are evident in surge and maturation in the area of philosophy of engineering, following the recognition of “the myriad of ways in which engineering innovations are directly responsible for transforming the social fabric and established institutions of everyday life,” a transformation that is accompanied with “an increasing unease and questioning of engineering not only on the part of the general public but also by some engineers themselves” (Michelfelder and Doorn, 2021: 1). These uneasiness and interrogation within the theoretical engineering community as well as among practicing engineers point to debates that examine the relationship between engineering (and engineers) and the world and as such also relate to the educational dilemma between educational perspective and the world.

Expansive approaches to engineering

The intellectual curiosity about engineering and the ethical concerns about it have led to emergence of expansive approaches to engineering. In reviewing major approaches, the aim here is to provide possible pointers for gaining insights about K-12 engineering education that support education’s autonomy.

Feminist engineering maintains that engineering ought not to be considered only through a materialist ontological lens, characterizes engineering as a cis-masculine profession and simultaneously a white, straight, able-bodied, professional class activity, and critiques engineering’s (and also science’s) “presumed objectivity, characterized by reductionism and abstraction, logical positivism, and a ‘view from nowhere’ that evacuates emotion and normative values” (Riley, 2021: 651). As a result, feminist engineering seeks to reconfigure engineering ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics. Against the dominant and narrow views of and in engineering, feminist epistemology is characterized by situated knowledges, shaped by the positionality of the knower, and feminist ethics “finds fault in an abstract, decontextualized, and depersonalized positionality in masculinist ethics, arguing that feminist ethics must be relational, and contextualized through the use of narrative” (p. 654). Therefore, feminist ethical practices constitute engineering processes of iterative design or design as care, as a basis for an empathic engineering that gives a considerable role for affect and emotion.

Green engineering, at times referred as environmental engineering, contends that technological modernity is related to environmental justice (EJ) and that “engineers play some role in the perpetuation of environmental injustice or the lack of attention to issues of EJ in technology design” (Cohen, 2021: 692). However, instead of an attitude that just blames engineering in environmental problems, engineering (as well as science and technology) is seen as “both the font of environmental problems and the means to redress those problems,” and as such a move “beyond causal arrows pointing in only one engineering-to-injustice direction” (Cohen, 2021: 692). Therefore, engineers should work (and have worked) not only to redress injustices, often as a matter of more equitable distribution of environmental benefits and harms, but also to design technologies with principles of justice in mind, often through a design approach that includes community members in the design process. Thus, green engineering involves “the design and synthesis of materials, processes, systems, and devices with the objective of minimizing overall environmental impact (including energy utilization and waste production) throughout the entire life cycle of a product or process,” as well as the “design, commercialization, and use of processes and products that minimize pollution, promote sustainability, and protect human health without sacrificing economic viability and efficiency” (Catalano, 2021: 701–2). As such, green engineering “can be considered environmentally conscious attitudes, values, and principles combined with sound science, technology, and engineering practice and is inherently inter- and cross-disciplinary in nature” (p. 701). Central concerns in this regard are biodiversity and environmental racism. A “cradle-to-cradle” green design goes further than reducing environmental damages towards an eco-effective design methodology that yields positive outcomes, such in the case of a process of purifying waste water that actually produces drinking water, produces more energy than is consumed, and produces more and new materials for human and natural consumption (see Catalano, 2021).

Humanitarian engineering focuses on the well-being of people who are traditionally not considered as part of engineering practices. Catalano, 2021 brings several definitions of humanitarian engineering that share the concern for underprivileged communities. Thus, in one definition humanitarian engineering is “the application of engineering to improving the well-being of marginalized people and disadvantaged communities, usually in the developing world” with an emphasis upon sustainability, low costs, and locally available resources for the solutions advanced, and in another definition humanitarian engineering is “the use of science and engineering to invent, create, design, develop, or improve technologies which promote the well-being of communities which are facing grand humanitarian challenges (fast growing populations, poor, disaster-hit, marginalized, or underserved communities)” (p. 704). The importance in such a view of engineering is in decentering the vague notion of public and instead focusing on and demonstrating compassion toward particular fellow humans that need support. As such (and speaking from an American perspective that applies also globally), humanitarian engineering offers the engineering profession “a chance to consider the plights of those who traditionally not been included in engineering classrooms-the poor in this country as well as overseas, and the native peoples who were subject to colonialization throughout the Americas” (p. 705).

Socially responsible engineering focuses on the duties and accountability of corporates while taking on engineering projects. Similar to humanitarian engineering, it identifies specific groups of people to whom engineers are responsible rather than the amorphous notion of “society at large” or “the public.” By examining the locus of “ethics,” socially responsible engineering critiques engineering ethics that centers around conflicts between the corporate’s capital interests and possible impacted people in a particular situation, and as such positioning engineering ethics as a matter of issues of right and wrong in personal conduct and individual engineers engaging in heroic actions of whistleblowing. This approach fails to consider “the everyday, more mundane ways in which engineers encounter ethical dilemmas and are constrained by their corporate and organizational structure and how deviance can be normalized” (Smith and Lucena, 2021: 667). Instead of the case-oriented approach, socially responsible engineering considers the inherently political dimensions of engineering, and the “broader context of engineering and its imbrication with social, political, and economic structures of power” (p. 666). As such, socially responsible engineering treats engineering as a “socio-technical practice that is always embedded in relationships of power” (p. 668). Therefore, the responsibility of engineers is “to acknowledge those power structures and their own roles within them, and then to find ways to direct their professional practice to mitigating those asymmetries” (p. 668). A prominent distinction in this regard is between microanalysis and macroethics. While microanalysis, the dominant ethical scrutiny in corporates, focuses on individual ethical dilemmas and is context-specific and local, macroethics emphasizes principles, universal claims and normative rules, and embraces social and environmental responsibility towards societal issues such as sustainable development and product liability.

While socially responsible engineering addresses the ethical role of corporates and of engineers working for them, it is—as well as other ethical frameworks—criticized by a movement for engineering and social justice demands a substantial shift in the way engineers integrate ethics. At the forefront of this movement is the Engineering, Social Justice and Peace (ESJP) organization, founded in 2004 by Caroline Baillie. The ESJP challenges the notion of an engineering profession either as value-free or one that is firmly entrenched in capitalism in their work. Criticizing reliance on ethics codes and the Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) practice for using communities’ resources, Baillie (2021) makes it clear that “adopting an ethical standpoint does not necessarily mean the same thing as being a socially just engineer” (p. 676). Through the example of the mining industry, she claims that corporates’ commitment to doing something for host-communities such as investing in local education and infrastructure, typically “does not involve change in the mining process itself but, rather, aims to offset or ‘correct’ any injustices that result from exploitation activities within an overall and relatively recent framing of ‘Mining for Development’” (p. 681). This attitude is a result of ethical codes that reflect the dominant paradigm of exploitation in which they were created and are now being employed, and consequently engineers “blindly accept and do not question the thought style that they work within,” and they “part of a thought collective that they were not even aware of.” Baillie concludes that “[a]ll too often engineers are not in a position to do this critical questioning, as they did not learn the skills in school” (p. 684–5). Instead, Baillie challenges us to ask (and also answers), “what would engineering look like if we put people first (and worried afterwards if we could afford it), rather than profit (and worrying afterwards if we had harmed anyone)? Would we engineer different things? Certainly. Would we engineer in a different way? Absolutely” (p. 674).

Embodying such critical approach, ESJP has developed a theoretical framework that declares commitments to “identifying and dismantling specific occurrences of injustice related to engineering and technology” and “in collaboration with community groups facing specific structures of injustice… to devising and developing technologies and other engineering solutions (broadly conceived) to the problems they face” (quoted in Baillie, 2021: 675). ESJP is also committed to “resisting injustice in its many forms through promotion of diversity and inclusivity, and by working towards fair, equitable, and sustainable treatment of people and their environments. We are critical of structures of thought conducive to injustice, including the reductionism and positivism prevalent in engineering. We oppose globalized economic policies that lead to the breaking of local networks of labor, production, and food provision” (Baillie, 2021: 675). Baillie argues that such a resistance demonstrates a critical lens that goes further than the ethical frameworks of humanitarian engineering and socially responsible engineering, as it involves “questioning structures of thought or the dominant ideologies behind Western engineering practices, which are based on particular values and norms. We rarely see engineers working for sustainability questioning neoliberal economic policies” (Baillie, 2021: 675).

Educational perspective in K-12 engineering education

Before discussing how the ethical frameworks can be employed within Biesta’s proposal, an explanation of the current situation of K-12 engineering education is required.

K-12 engineering education

K-12 engineering education literature tends to analyze engineering within an interdisciplinary context of STEM or STEAM education, and even considers engineering as a starting point for such interdisciplinary frameworks. As Purzer and Shelley (2018) observe, “Engineering, with its interdisciplinary nature and its focus on problem-solving, is the most natural anchor for STEM integration” (p. 39). As this quote suggests, engineering, more than any other STEM component, is problem-solving oriented. Studies find that benefits of engineering education in schools include not only increased knowledge and skills, but also lifelong skills such as teamwork, communication, and creativity, as well as persistence, motivation, self-confidence, and STEM identity (Sneider and Ravel, 2021).

While engineering education is well established in higher education, what is of interest for us is its rise and prominence within the K-12 context, demonstrated in increase of relevant publications (e.g. National Research Council, 2010; International Journal of Engineering Education, Special Issue: Current Trends in K-12 Engineering Education, 2017, 33(1)) and new academic and scholarly venues dedicated for K-12 engineering education, such as the Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (established in 2011). This rise can be explained by the emphasis in (general and K-12) engineering education on design as a central mode of thinking (Moore et al., 2014) and a key ingredient in the problem-solving process. The problem-solving orientation of engineering education demonstrates not only the inherent instrumental usage of engineering but also the narrow attention to and presentation of engineering as a human endeavor, as stressed in the expansive approaches to engineering in philosophy of engineering literature we explored in the previous section.

The literature on K-12 engineering education is not completely indifferent to some philosophical considerations of engineering, though these considerations are not necessarily labeled as philosophical. However, these considerations are usually raised in the context of problem-solving. Thus, for example, Moore et al. (2014) maintain that “[e]ngineering requires students to be independent, reflective, and metacognitive thinkers who understand that prior experience and learning from failure can ultimately lead to better solutions” (p. 5), and also that: “The problems that we face in today’s society are increasingly complex and multidisciplinary in nature. In order to solve these problems, students need to be able to understand the impact of their solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context” (p. 6). However, when it comes to curriculum documents and eventually to what happens in the classroom, K-12 engineering education almost completely ignores any of the philosophical issues discussed in the literature, including the multiple “faces” engineering has as evident in the expansive approaches to engineering. This suggests that engineering’s autonomy is limited in current K-12 engineering education. But it also suggests that, quite ironically, to maintain education’s autonomy it is important to keep engineering’s autonomy and not to reduce engineering to technical “neutral” problem-solving. In light of this, what can we learn from the expansive approaches to engineering about addressing the educational dilemma between an educational perspective and the world in K-12 engineering education, and perhaps about this dilemma in general?

Resistance in engineering education

The review of theoretical frameworks of ethics in engineering and in engineers’ work shows how the dilemma between an internal professional perspective and the world out there is articulated when considering the impacts of engineering projects on people and the environment, and especially on disadvantaged communities and their natural resources. In fact, these frameworks in engineering ethics blur such an internal-external distinction and argue for an integral, interwoven consideration of justice in the engineer’s work. In different ways and to different degrees, the expansive approaches to engineering seek to expand the responsibility of the engineer from a professional that is expected to follow codes to an active agent for social (and environmental) justice. Following these calls to revise the onus on engineers, and as systematic training in engineering ethics is done in undergraduate engineering programs, the different frameworks critique traditional approaches in engineering education and offer changes in these programs so that the graduate engineer will be ready and willing to apply the frameworks in their work. Thus, for example, the dominant case study method for teaching students to apply codes is critiqued as encouraging engineers to be complacent since it “does not require students to struggle with the trade-offs involved in actual engineering decisions or with the fact that the consequences of those decisions become clear only in retrospect” (quoted in Catalano, 2021: 666). In addition to rigorous engineering basics, training in humanitarian engineering is suggested to include history, politics, economics, sociology, and language, and training in engineering for social adds critical theory to the list (Catalano, 2021).

The expansive approaches to engineering offer different “angles” or “levels” to look at the relation between engineering as a profession of problem-solving design and the world that “receives” the products of this design. The angles are demonstrated in taking different theoretical perspectives or centering different agendas, whether it is a feminist, green (environmental), humanitarian, responsible corporate, or social justice. But (at least some of) these theoretical perspectives can be also ordered by their ethical “scope.” Thus, Catalano, 2021 offers a picture where traditional engineering’s boundaries of professional responsibility are extended by green engineering, which is extended by humanitarian engineering, then by engineering for social justice, and finally by what he calls omnium engineering that sees the engineering profession as ethically responsible toward the wants and needs of all life forms, not only that of the human species. In either case, the expansive approaches to engineering suggest to K-12 engineering education—as in undergraduate programs—a horizon to which to aspire. However, while in undergraduate programs the ethical frameworks are aimed at adult students who (at least in general) pursue a career in engineering, in K-12 education the goal is not to train future engineers but the goal is an educational goal, that is, if we adopt an educational perspective of schooling. So what, if any, to take from the expansive approaches if we have an educational perspective in mind? ⁷

I argue that a major factor here, while considering the education-world dilemma, is the school’s duty to resist society’s desires, as Biesta (2022) put it. In general philosophical analyses of engineering and in different terminologies and to different degrees in the different expansive approaches to engineering, resistance is declared as a key characteristic of engineering and in the engineer’s work. Thus, Mitcham, 2021 identifies the “effort within the engineering community to construct a professional self-understanding as obligated to protect public safety, health, and welfare in a way that would give engineers sufficient autonomy to resist excessive control by distorting commercial interests” (p. 19). But perhaps the clearest and strongest vows for resistance are asserted by the movement of engineering and social justice which is critical of other frameworks for not being explicit about being critical of, opposing, and resisting dominant ideologies and structures of thought. And thus, in both movements, education’s autonomy and engineering and social justice, scholars and activists seek to characterize and realize autonomy for a profession to manage its relationships with the world, and claim an independent perspective that keeps at bay neoliberal (and also other) interests. ⁸ As a leader of this movement, we already saw the ESJP’s commitments to identify and dismantle specific occurrences of injustice related to engineering and technology and to resist injustice in its many forms (Baillie, 2021). Therefore, resistance should be a key guideline in K-12 engineering curriculum. Such an approach goes beyond a (welcome by itself) current discourse of “impacts” in some high school engineering courses that present central tenets of consideration of social and environmental impacts, and curricular competencies of critical analysis how competing social, ethical, and sustainability considerations impact creation and development of solutions and evaluating unintended negative consequences of a design. ⁹

Introducing resistance and raising issues of social power structures in K-12 engineering education is important also in order to differentiate between the areas of engineering and technology, that too often are conflated in literature (even, at times, in philosophy of engineering) and practice, especially within the interdisciplinary contexts of STEM/STEAM education. ¹⁰ While educators might have their own ways to discern differences between the two, it is suggested here to associate technology with the device and integrated system contexts and the engagement of the individual within them, and engineering with the social-political-ideological contexts and the engagement of communities, societies, and humanity with designed systems. To be sure, both areas involve design and complexity, as well as (though in a more limited sense in engineering) hands-on application of technological means, especially computers, and both areas are also value-laden; Heidegger (1977/1955) has already showed how technology is not neutral. ¹¹ Moreover, ethics is certainly also an issue in technology, especially (but not only) in our information age, and resistance to conventions and dominant ideologies and practices is also a matter when engaging with technology. However, a separation between engineering and technology will be helpful to clarify and stress the political-social dimension of problem-solving, and especially when it comes to social justice.

The middle ground in engineering education

But integrating ethics in K-12 engineering education, even in terms of resistance, still does not go to the heart of educational perspective. We are still left with the dilemma of how an educational perspective is to be expressed in school and in engineering courses in light of the world out there. To put the dilemma bluntly: the world, countries, and communities need more engineers (and programmers, medical doctors, and a variety of other professionals) to tackle social problems. Even if (some of) these problems are self-proclaimed, should K-12 education ignore them? While it is true that “the next generation is not simply seen as a ‘recruitment pool’ for society” (Biesta, 2022: 5), some students today will be engineers in the future (though not “tomorrow,” not in the coming few years), and some already considering (or “decided” to pursue) engineering careers.

Since Biesta (2022) associates between the education-world dilemma and educational goal, it is worth asking whether, if any, his solution is relevant to curricular considerations in general and for K-12 engineering education in particular. Biesta keeps his discussion general and mainly abstract, and does not attempt to apply his suggestion to curriculum or the subject-matter teacher’s work. He talks in terms of the “educational work” and the relationship between the educator and the student, with the need of supporting students stay in “the difficult ‘middle ground’ between world-destruction and self-destruction-the middle ground where grown-up co-existence with what and how is other takes place” (p. 11). What could this middle ground be when we teach students a subject matter?

Let’s focus on high school engineering courses where the bulk of explicit and direct engineering teaching happens. Such courses are elective, and introduce students to design in engineering in abstract and practical means. The students might take the course for different reasons, but we can say that generally they have at least some interest in engineering (or STEM in general), either in general or in particular branch of engineering, and they might consider post-secondary studies in engineering. In order to inquire about the existential middle ground Biesta calls for, we need to ask what situations might a student find themselves facing resistance to their initiatives that could lead them to world-destruction (“own force becomes so strong”) or self-destruction (withdrawal “from any engagement with the world”) in high school engineering courses, and what might be a middle ground where students experience the difficult “worldly existence, existence in and with the world” (Biesta, 2017: 14).

In engineering education, to take seriously Biesta’s (2017) call to focus on the question of “how they are, and not on the question of who they are,” that is, not on identity but subjectivity, which is “the question of human subject-ness or of the human ‘condition’ of being-subject” (p. 8, all emphases in original), means to regard engineering less as a possible future profession (and hence a future-oriented “role” in society that requires training) and more as a context in which to demonstrate grown-up-ness in terms of one’s acknowledgement of “the alterity and integrity of what and who is other… that the world ‘out there’ is indeed ‘out there’” (p. 8). Shifting the attention about engineering from a future occupation in which one needs to be trained to a sphere of human interactions resonates with Biesta’s (2017) emphasis that grown-up-ness” is not “a developmental stage or the outcome of a developmental trajectory,” but “a particular ‘quality’ or way of existing” (p. 8). And in light of the expansive approaches to engineering that emphasize ethical consideration of both social and environmental consequences, Biesta’s inclusion of both the natural and the social world in the world “out there” suddenly makes K-12 engineering education to appear as a reasonable—not to say “natural”—curricular candidate for addressing the education-world dilemma about how to reconcile an educational perspective with the world out there. But we need to be cautious here with the allegedly converging terms. In order to regard engineering less as training object and more as an “exercise” in being-subject, its major (if not the central) character of problem-solving, as presented above, needs to be decentered in favor of co-existence. Such shift aligns with, or echoes, the calls in the expansive approaches for collaborations with other stakeholders, mostly the communities who face injustice. Thus, engineering courses or activities will focus less on finding the optimal “winning” design out of possible alternatives (which requires “overcoming” the negative consequences), and more on the difficult process of making alliances with stakeholders.

This shift in what engineering means suggests opportunities for the difficult middle ground between world-destruction and self-destruction, in terms of a more critical treatment of engineering as a possible career path for students. It is tempting here to take world-destruction as the damaging impacts of engineering on the physical landscape and the social fabric, and self-destruction as total withdrawal from practicing engineering. However, this is “too easy” (though not unrelated) analogy to Biesta’s picture that refers to engineering as a profession and not as a human condition of being-subject, an analogy that imagines the “initiatives” Biesta mentions to be engineering projects (which fits more undergraduate programs) instead of individual endeavors. That is why I do not offer here discouraging students from perusing an engineering career, including post-secondary engineering education. What I do offer is (for high school engineering courses, at least) to create situations that “shake” (but not break) the ground beneath the engineering aspirations of the students, and pull students in and out of what we might call the engineering “zone.” The world-destruction end in this case is taking the engineering path towards engineering studies and career in any cost and whatever are the difficulties and consequences (especially when I “love” engineering and have the skills for it), and the self-destruction end is regarding engineering as something that is not for me after experiencing it in school. The educational work of the teacher is to push students towards (or encourage to stay in) the in-between area that involves doubts regarding the students’ “existential fitness” to demonstrate human subject-ness.

Thus, you (an imaginary student) might achieve good grades in your engineering course, but are you willing and capable to truly engage with the messy ethical questions of engineering? On the other hand, even if you struggle with the course, don’t you think you might have a responsibility to “jump into” this messy ethical reality? ¹² The point here is that, since the middle ground is a dialogue in an “existential form, a way of being together that seeks to do justice to all partners involved” (Biesta, 2017: 14), the consideration about taking the engineering path is not only about you the student, whether you are drawn to it or reluctant to purse it further. As Biesta (2022) puts it, “in the dialogue of child and world both the existence of the child and the existence of the world are ‘at stake’” (p. 100). Since the educational task is “arousing the desire in another human being for wanting to exist in a grown-up way” (p. 20), and as “[t]o stay in the middle ground thus requires that we affirm and perhaps even embrace this difficulty as the very difficulty that makes our existence possible” (p. 15), the engineering teacher’s task is to make the student willingly aware of the complex and convoluted array of interests, needs, powers, and conditions involved in the engineering profession and the human condition in general. ¹³

Conclusion

This paper addresses a dilemma of education’s autonomy within K-12 engineering education: how to relate to the world out there that needs engineers while at the same time keep an educational perspective and meet a specific educational goal. In particular, the paper examines how Biesta’s ideas of grown-up-ness and a middle ground can be employed in K-12 engineering courses. The task is not easy, as Biesta calls for opening up a difficult existential possibility for students in schools while a traditional engineering teaching is developmental and future-oriented towards performing design and problem-solving. This difficulty demonstrates, or reveals, the complexity in characterizing education’s relationships with specific social spheres and practices if education’s autonomy is to be maintained: the inspiration to protect K-12 education from negative external influences clashes with necessary social goods in which schooling has an important role. But an honest and direct engagement with this task is required in order to gain support for education’s autonomy both among scholars and practitioners, as well as policy-makers and the broad public.