Engineering and social justice

At each of our Jesuit institutions, our university core curriculum transforms our students through Ignatian pedagogy.  Our engineering students can draw upon this social justice foundation in analyzing how engineering decisions affect the world.  At Loyola Chicago, the social justice case studies embedded in our engineering curriculum provide methods for this analysis and the path towards an increased sense of engineering professional responsibility.

We wish to share our various social justice case study methods and assessment with other engineering schools. We use our case studies to evaluate ABET Student Outcomes (3) and (4).  More importantly, we want to train other engineering schools to develop their own case studies, incorporating their local geographic contexts.

We are also conducting engineering education research at three Jesuit engineering institutions to measure the effect of social justice case studies on our students’ sense of engineering professional responsibility.