Teaching to Transgress in a Technology and Society Course

Abstract In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks shares insights into pedagogy informed by her own history as a student and a postsecondary instructor, as well as anticolonial, feminist, and critical approaches to teaching and learning. hooks (1994) celebrates "teaching that enables transgressions – a movement against and beyond boundaries… that makes education the practice of freedom" (hooks, 1994, p. 12). She highlights the importance of passion, relationality, and criticality to liberatory pedagogy that empowers students to engage deeply and agentively in the classroom. In engineering education, liberative pedagogies have been used to connect course content to students' experiences, position students as authorities in the classroom, critically discuss issues of ethics and policy, and avoid centering course content around Western notions of engineering (Riley, 2003). In this paper, I explore the redesign of an undergraduate engineering technology and society course in relation to the idea of liberatory pedagogy in bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress. As I prepared for my first offering of the course "Technology, Society, and the Future," I drew upon my experiences in engineering, educational research, and information sciences to shape not only the content of the course (as hooks argues that content changes alone do not result in liberatory pedagogy) but also course structure, assignments, and expectations. I eschewed traditional case studies that portray engineering as objective and apolitical and instead highlighted the work of scholars such as Ruha Benjamin who critically examine the complex relationship between technology and whiteness, sexism, colonialism, and other systems of oppression. Following hooks' arguments about intellectual authority and legitimacy, I designed assignments such as four-corner debates that required students to defend their own opinions on complex sociotechnical issues that don't have one "correct" answer – basing their response on scholarly sources as well as their own experiences. Students were also assigned to lead small group discussions which disrupted traditional power dynamics of the instructor as the teacher and the students as passive receivers of knowledge and instead aimed to establish a community of learning in the classroom. Finally, I used written reflection assignments to encourage students to "think critically about themselves and their lives… to move forward, to change, to grow" (hooks, 1994, p. 202). This critical thinking is imperative for engineering students to meet the existing and emerging sociotechnical challenges of today's world. Reflecting on my attempts to cultivate this shift towards transgressive and liberative pedagogy is particularly interesting given the context of my course: one that is mandatory for almost every engineering student at my institution and at the same time is at odds with more traditional engineering pedagogies and technical content that make up the bulk of their academic experiences. Among other emotions, my students and I experienced surprise when viewing an everyday technology such as an airport scanner from a new perspective, as well as uncertainty in how to lead small group discussions around challenging topics. I hope that my lessons learned about "teaching to transgress" in an engineering technology and society course will be useful to instructors of similar courses.