STS Postures: Changing How Undergraduate Engineering Students Move Through the World

This paper presents the application of a teaching strategy we are calling "Science, Technology and Society (STS) Postures," that is used to help engineering students conceptualize socio-technical systems.STS Postures integrate three modes of doing: 1) Body/Mind fusion; 2) Data collection techniques; and 3) Systems thinking skills.STS postures takes a traditionally passive educational environment and introduces movement and change making to the engineering curriculum.Instead of sitting in seats in the classroom, we encourage students to move about.We try out different ways of holding ourselves and moving (literally our bodies) in relation to each other, STS, engineering, education, and technological artifacts.This change in posture is key to having agency in directing the future of science and technology, whether in their own education, their extracurricular work, or their careers.Body/Mind fusion is a corrective to thinking in science and engineering that separates the body from the mind, which reinforces counterproductive ideologies (e.g., depolitizication) and mindsets (e.g., technical narrowness, "the myth of objectivity") in engineering.We encourage students to connect intellectual endeavors with emotions, performance, proprioception, enteroception, metacognition, and play.Data collection itself is a form of movement that involves BodyMind abilities; put differently, how would we collect data without BodyMind?We teach a pallet of qualitative data collection techniques, such as document analysis, interviews, natural observation, participant observation, focus groups, visual image analysis, and metaphor analysis.These skills help students embrace a "systems thinking mindset" that involves understanding how to: 1) listen contextually; 2) find ethics in artifacts; 3) make meaning; 4) seek stories about science and technology's past, present, and future; 5) locate power in systems; 6) ask STS questions; and 7) host STS parties.We reason that if students can take some of these data collection skills and mindsets into their engineering classrooms, internships, and careers, we will have given them life-long tools of interruption for responsibly interrogating their interactions with science and technology.This paper provides examples of STS Posture activities that are used within a required engineering ethics course.