A quick story about teaching about social justice. I used to be a professor at an engineering university. I taught and researched in a number of areas, but one area ended up being about how engineers were engaged in development projects. 1/

By “development projects” I’m talking about Engineers Without Borders type stuff, projects where engineers and engineering students would travel to developing countries to work on infrastructure projects. At the time, 2/

these projects had a pretty abysmal success rate. Like, parachuting a bunch of young freshmen from America into Sierra Leone to build wells ended up having long-lasting positive impacts for one of those groups only (spoiler: the students). 3/

Anyway, some colleagues and I wrote a modest book about that. But we didn’t just want to be critics. We wanted to look at better ways of doing things. It seemed like social justice could be a better framework. It allowed us to educate students to think more 4/

as partners *with* communities and not doing things *for* communities, which was problematic for all sorts of reasons. It wasn’t perfect, but it permitted an awareness of context and humility about one’s own positioning and self awareness in general. 5/

That work was supported by the National Academy of Engineering and the National Science Foundation and led to a special issue of a journal in the topic, which I edited. This is what it means to teach with social justice in mind: 6/

working with students to think more deeply about what we owe others, what it means to “help,” how we define what it means to work for what is just, what legacies of colonialism mean for how we relate to each other, why we’re seen certain ways around the world, and so on. 7/

You can’t work effectively, in engineering or otherwise, without this kind of training. We heard this from NAE and NSF and the private sector. So don’t let the bad faith messengers take this one. This is work we should be doing.