Incorporating feminist pedagogy into the engineering learning experience

Abstract

A framework is presented for implementing feminist pedagogy along with demonstrative examples from engineering curricula. The framework for incorporating the values of feminism into the learning experience focuses on three aspects: 1) learning management strategies, 2) assessment and evaluation strategies and 3) strategies for critiquing existing power structures and the engineering process. Feminist pedagogy strategies suggested by others include cooperative learning, providing students a voice in classroom management decisions, structuring student interactions to facilitate all students' participation, having students participate in designing evaluation rubrics and assigning projects that require more than technical skills. A unique feature which feminist pedagogy offers to engineering education is the critique of power structures in relation to the engineering process. For example, the following questions can be addressed: (a) How are engineering processes influenced by the historical frameworks of their development?; (b) How are decisions made?; (c) Who makes decisions?; (d) Who benefits from the decisions?; and (e) What values do they reflect?