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Embracing the social turn: epistemic change in engineering students enrolled in an anthro-design course

Abstract:

Today, engineers are expected to face challenges that involve complicated social elements related to new technological developments and their adoption. In this scenario, there needs to be a renewed attention to the instilment of general epistemic beliefs that facilitate multidisciplinary collaboration and the incorporation of social science practices. In other words, there is a need for a “social turn” in engineering education. In the following case study, we examine the learning process of 45 undergraduate engineering students enrolled in an Anthro-Design course at a private university in Chile. This course teaches students to use cultural anthropology and design tools to generate an applied qualitative research project for real-life counterparts. Under a socio-constructivist approach, we developed a sequential explanatory design, with an emphasis on qualitative data [quant- > QUAL]. We used the three factor Epistemic Beliefs Inventory (EBI) to conduct pre-post assessment. Semi-structured interviews were conducted at the end of the course to explore representations of key epistemic notions such as objectivity and validity. This study identifies a significant diversity in how epistemic notions such as validity and objectivity are represented by students after undertaking a course that embraces the social turn. This diversity can also be observed in non-epistemic notions related to the learning experience. We argue that a better understanding of the research process and the handling of qualitative information under rigorous theoretical frameworks are key to changing beliefs about the nature of knowledge within the engineering-design students’ context.